3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
12:50 p.m.
In article <4F030D4A.2010704 at mail.msu.edu>,
Josh Dersch <derschjo at mail.msu.edu> writes:
I know how to program in BASIC (and many other
imperative programming
languages). I also know how to program in Lisp. The learning of the
latter did not require me to "un-learn" anything I had previously come
across.
Dijkstra's statement is snarky and amusing. It is not, however, an
essential truism.
As someone who learned BASIC first and then a slew of other languages
later, I would also disagree with Dijkstra's statement. It's a nice
sound bite that gets people's attention, but it's neither a truism,
nor is it even an essential statement about programming. It's just
his bias showing through.
The only programming language I never really bent my brain around was
Prolog, but I admit to only having sampled it briefly in a programming
languages survey course. I probably would have grokked it had I
spent more time with it. LISP, functional programming (in fp, no
less <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP_(programming_language)>),
Modula-2, Algol (call by name, yay!), OO languages, symbolic programming
in Mathemtica, etc., never gave me any problems.
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