From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2019 08:35:51 -0800 Subject: [COFF] What languges would you like to learn? In-Reply-To: <129b28e1-5629-2742-bb04-dfe6161ea3f0@telegraphics.com.au> References: <129b28e1-5629-2742-bb04-dfe6161ea3f0@telegraphics.com.au> Message-ID: <20191224163551.GA3839@mcvoy.com> On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 11:28:12AM -0500, Toby Thain wrote: > On 2019-12-23 6:27 p.m., Nemo Nusquam wrote: > > A recent thread makes me wonder which languages would people like to > > learn??? (I confess to trying, as Dave does, but time prevents anything > > more that learing syntax and writing toy programmes.?? One must write > > something substantial -- not synonomous with large -- to really learn a > > language.) > > > > Erlang, Smalltalk, Prolog, Haskell, and Scheme come to mind... > > You have GREAT taste, and that covers the major paradigms. As a systems guy who likes to get all the perf he can out of the machine, those are not what I'd reach for 1st, 2nd, or 3rd. I still like C, it's what I reach for first. Go might be second. For scripting I designed http://little-lang.org which looks a lot like interpreted C with a bunch of neat extensions (ever wanted strings in your switch() statement? How about regexps?). I The listed languages are what a very small set of programmers passionately love but they never go anywhere because the rank and file programmers don't get it. I can think of lots of examples where some smart dude pushed lisp in a company and it either never went anywhere or it died when the dude left. There is a lot to be said for programming in the most simple way possible, we had a saying at my company "Write code so it is the most readable. Because 6 months from now you'll not remember it, it will be like reading someone else's code". Code is write once, read many. Optimize for that.