On 1/1/06, Paul Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote: > > > Art Hixson wrote: > > > >> Over the years I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of > >> Fortran, Cobol, assembly for a variety of machines, Forth, Rexx, > >> Modula, Python. While Modula is syntactically perfect and Python, as > >> its descendant, is pretty nearly so, they still have a rather old > >> fashioned feel and while useful aren't particularly interesting. > > > > > > That's an interesting observation, given that LISP is probably older > > than all of the languages you mention :) > > Fortran was invented in 1954. The implementation of LISP began in Fall > 1958.
I'm sure this will send this thread way off topic, but what a better way to ring in the new year, right? ... I programmed in C professionally for years before I realized what a hideous the language was for anything I really wanted to do at home (compose, mostly). I just never questioned the choice; in high school we were taught first Pascal, then C, and then later Java. In fact, I distinctly remember being told as a 15 year-old kid that, essentially, "interpreted languages are too slow (or even too simple-minded) to be of any use to anyone other than academics; *real* code gets written in a *real* language, which means there's a compiler back there somewhere." I'm not making any of this up; I'm repeating from high school computer sciences almost verbatim ... and since I frankly wasn't very interested in my computer science classes at the time (and certainly didn't see myself working in tech later in life) I accepted blindly. And so did almost everybody else. Well time passes, and eventually I started slowly making the switch to interpreted, *functional* langauges ... python first, then Mathematica's core language, and Scheme (partially because of Lily, of course). And I've never been more productive in front of a computer. For loops suck; counter variables suck; temporary variable suck; none of those things are necessary ... at least for me in the way that I like to think about symbolic expressions and symbolic transformations. That's what mappings and some version of lambda are for. I know not everyone agrees, of course, (which is why python has list comprehensions, map ( ) *and* for loops), but the switch to an interpreted-functional paradigm has been a major enabler for me, and I wish more programmers in the humanities out there --- even beginning programmers -- knew this. All of which brings up the following point: if, as Han-Wen (and others) have pointed out a number of times on the list, LISP was around almost from the beginning, then why was it that so much of the world's computing infrastructure got built in Fortran, Cobol and C and that, later, sitting in computer science classrooms in the 1990s I (and probably a whole generation of other American high school students ... dunno about Europe or Canada or Japan) was lead directly away from the functional-interpreted paradigm and directly towards the compiled, C paradigm? One answer must have to do with our teachers: they knew Pascal and C but they didn't know Scheme, Haskell or ML as anything other than an academic curiosity. And another answer is probably the reputation that interpreted languages had (still have?) for being slow.And almost certainly, still another answer is the fact that UNIX "won" at a very early ... and C was most definitely more "the language of UNIX" than was any LISP variant. But whatever the reasons, I'm genuinely disappointed that compiled languages have held the position they've held in at least my experience with the teaching of languages in high school and undergrad. It seems like somewhere along the line someone might try saying to our students "if you're planning on doing anything symbolic, might I suggest that you look towards LISP.". </off topic> ;-) -- Trevor Bača [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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