Re: [9fans] nice quote

[Daniel Lyons <fusion@storytotell.org>]

On Sep 7, 2009, at 3:05 AM, Greg Comeau wrote:

>> Some keep saying that we should use more complex languages in
>> the introductory course because they're in some way easier.
>> But I've yet to understand their definition of easier.
>
> I've seen this before.  It's usually a combo of people
> not knowing what they're talking about, making stuff up
> as they go along, generalizing their personal programming
> universe, being elite, and, miscommunication their point.


I have a friend who insists that every other language has been harder  
on him than macro assembler. And I think that's true, if you cannot  
understand how to program a machine other than by thinking about  
what's happening at the instruction level of the processor.

Each language provides its own view of the land. If you have a strong  
understanding of the hardware and wish to think in those terms you  
will probably find assembler or C to be your best friend. If you have  
a strong mathematical inclination Haskell will probably suit you  
better. I find Scheme introduces a model of computation which is a  
compromise between the two; close to the machine in memory, simple in  
syntax, and rather far from the machine in terms of continuations, but  
most of the code being in the middle anyway.

Part of what makes computing so interesting to me is that we can  
remodel it to suit different needs, tastes or problems. If we had to  
write our schedulers in rc, we'd probably find it obnoxious; similarly  
if we had to write trivial pipelines in C. The nice thing about Lisp,  
Haskell and Java is that when you're in their little world everything  
works the way you'd expect it to in their little world; the nice thing  
about Plan 9 and Unix is that most everything is designed to interact  
sanely and simply with the rest of the world. I find writing puzzle  
solvers simpler in Prolog than in Haskell despite Haskell's list  
comprehensions being essentially the same in power and somewhat more  
straightforward to reason about.

For some reason, the fact that we program rational machines in logic- 
based languages deludes us into thinking our experience is the same as  
everyone else's or our situation must be the same as everyone else's.  
I don't know anyone who likes to debate a programmer and isn't also a  
programmer; we are undoubtedly the most self-assured and non- 
empathetic group of people on the planet. We have every opportunity to  
be free of dogma, but our reason and our aesthetic reactions seem  
somehow to be soldered directly onto our emotions.

A problem is that the world isn't as rational as we are. It often  
chooses based on expedience, popularity, rumor, or emotion. Often the  
good is devoured by good marketing. I never would have expected to  
find defenders of Lisp or Haskell here in the Plan 9 mailing list. I  
am happy about that. But the hindsight has not been 20/20. Lisp and  
Plan 9 are in the same situation for exactly the same reason: they're  
both conceptually rigorous and short on eye candy, and the market  
chose other alternatives long ago, and now those alternatives define  
the question in a way that precludes these answers.

—
Daniel Lyons