On Sun, 2012-02-19 at 17:14 -0500, John Gilmore wrote: > Learning curves are not culture-free; they are specific to a person > and his or her experience. What you find easy and congenial I may > find difficult and disagreeable. > > It is possible to teach able people abstractions that make learning a > new instance of some class of formalisms, statement-level programming > languages say, easy; but that is another matter. >
Very true. Learn COBOL, and FORTRAN is easier, as is PL/I. APL, however, will cause you problems. Or you'll write FORTRAN code in APL. And hate it. But if you want real fun, take somebody like me who only learned procedural languages in school. Now, give them Haskell or Erlang. Talk about culture shock. No, despite the saying of "You can program FORTRAN in any language.", you __cannot__ program FORTRAN in Haskell or Erlang. Nothing like a "true" variable, because once a name has an assigned value, that value cannot be changed. Well, not that version of that name. As Bo Pilgrim would say: "It's a mind bogglin' thing!" > -- John McKown Maranatha! <>< ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
