Re: [Caml-list] what is high-level (was: Wikipedia)

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org>]

On Fri, 4 Nov 2005, Blue Prawn wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Perhaps it would be a good idea to create un page on Wikipedia to 
> explain what is a high-level programming language,

As near as I can figure, the definition is simple.  Assembly language is 
not a high level language.  Everything else is.

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/C.html

>From that link:
> Although it is a high-level language, C is much closer to assembly 
> language than are most other high-level languages.

In other words, all languages are high-level, some are just more 
high-level than others.


> because its definition in all documents related to OCaml definitively do 
> not fit the definition the penguins gave to me when I started to go in 
> my lug, which was a language easy to learn and use designed for common 
> users, and not only for programers and computer scientists. They told me 
> about ABC which led to python which is comonly used in softwares as 
> scripting extention for the users. But OCaml do need some background 
> knowledge to understand the official manual, which is not true for PHP, 
> Python or Ruby.

OK, here's the thing: Ocaml is a different paradigm than Python, Ruby, and 
PHP.  If you know Pascal, C, Fortran, etc., then learning PHP isn't 
difficult, because it too is a procedural language.  If you know C++, 
Java, etc., then learning Python or Ruby isn't that hard, because they're 
Object Oriented languages too.  If you already know SML or Haskell, 
learning Ocaml wouldn't be that hard.  The problem is that most people 
don't know SML or Haskell.

Learning a new paradigm is hard.  As someone who has done it three times 
now (moving from the sphagetti code of Basic to the procedural style of 
Pascal, then moving to Object Oriented, and most recently Functional), 
trust me on this.  Learning a new paradigm makes learning a new language 
10 times as hard AT LEAST as learning a new language in the old paradigm.

Brian