On Fri, 9 Sep 2011, Andy Farnell wrote:

It's more a general theme in the discussion, I think the author's background is web so the casual examples mention it, at least in the bits I browsed - he was talking about erlang as a solution for distributed databases. The main examples for each language seemed standard compsci problems though, sorting, permuting, factoring etc.

But the basis of comparison necessary to justify today's language choices can hardly be made of those standard compsci problems, which are all very small scale.

For example, to see that goto was harmful, you had to see it on a large scale enough that it becomes tangled. If you do it on single-page-or-less compsci problems, goto always seems ok. Many of today's people have learned about goto only by indoctrination, but by doing projects that don't fit on a page (nor on a few), people can learn from experience that goto is harmful.

Multi-processor computing has been a compsci topic for about 30 years already, and distributed computing is nearly as old. TCP/IP-enabled kernels came from Berkeley in 1982, NFS in 1984, X11 officially in 1987 (but the project had been published since early 80's).

« Standard compsci » problems exclude a lot of new things for pedagogical reasons, to stay within the level of difficulty of first-year programming students and middle-year algorithmics students. There isn't a reason to stay within that problem set when the goal is to compare languages for daily use in potentially big practical projects.

| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC

On Fri, 9 Sep 2011, Andy Farnell wrote:

Standard problems also make good, familiar points of comparison.

This allows to make comparisons that completely miss the reasons why new languages are still being created.

Sadly it's the fringe cases, and the esoterica that is often most interesting.

Writing big programmes, in itself, is not fringe nor esoteric. And nowadays, in multitasking operating systems, if you don't happen to be talking to other computers over a network, you could instead be talking to other programmes on the same computer. In 2011, that's not fringe nor esoteric.

Going out of Programming 101 doesn't get you automatically in the odd and weird stuff. I don't know why you talk about going from an extreme to another.

| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC

On Sat, 10 Sep 2011, Andy Farnell wrote:

Just wondering if there was anything in that book you thought was cool. It struck me as a nice idea to compare a bunch of languages.

As a non-buyer, I only have access to two chapters, so, I can't comment on that book.

But I have read other similar books in the past. While I tried to study at UQÀH, I borrowed from the library the books that hardly anyone would borrow, such as Raphael A Finkel's Advanced Programming Language Design (1996), which was very new back then, and a bunch of other ones whose titles I don't remember.

I eventually bought Woodman's Programming Language Choice, but it was less interesting, as much of the focus was on teaching introductory courses, and much of the book is occupied by N persons each presenting their favourite kind of Pascal/Modula/Ada clone. I quickly found it dubious that persistency would be touted as a programming language feature, rather than the base concepts that would make persistency a kind of pluggable library. I could sense that it was a buzzword of that time (1996).

Then after that, it's only on the web that I learned about programming languages. That's how I learned about Ruby. Then I gradually stopped paying attention.

I encountered Pd for reasons somewhat unrelated.

BTW, the first study about programming language comparison happened around 1969-1972. It indexed several thousand programming languages that were already existing at that time, yet no language that we now use existed back then.

| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC

On Sat, 10 Sep 2011, Andy Farnell wrote:

On Sat, 10 Sep 2011 14:09:15 -0400 (EDT) Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:

...

BTW, the first study about programming language comparison happened around 1969-1972.

Love to know more about that. Can you remember the study title or keywords?

Look for Jean E. Sammet. I recall that she was repeatedly mentioned in the Woodman book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Sammet

| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC

Hi,

I have read the book myself, and it is not a book that claims "I will teach you seven languages in seven weeks", but the author introduces the reader to basic concepts in each language (prototypal inheritance, functional programming) and shows some aspects where each language has its advantages, e.g. concurrency, logical rules.

That said, the title may be misleading.

Best regards, Thomas

On 09.09.2011 08:45, Peter Plessas wrote:

Thanks! I cannot resist pointing to the following article: "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" http://norvig.com/21-days.html

with best regards! Peter

Andy Farnell wrote:

...

Anyone seen this? http://pragprog.com/book/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-weeks

I was flicking through it in Foyles bookshop yesterday and thought of many of the discussions we've had here of late. The style and content seem somewhat tuned to a web POV, but I think Pders would find something interesting. Just wondered if anyone else had read more because I'm tempted to buy it.

a.

---

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But we are trained to deduce unreasonable expectations from terse book titles and then blame that on the publishers.

I'm glad Peter posted the Norvig article and guess the 'ars longa, vita brevis' theme is there in Tate's book title in a cheeky way.

Of the languages I've encountered, maybe over 20 if allowing things like bash and assembly, most I haven't used in years. They were formative. Or they were trendy. The most "practical" language for me has that word in its acronym expansion. I once learned a functional language called ML, just to teach it, because someone had decided it should be on a syllabus. I suspect we may agree well on the value of such academic trajectories Mathieu, however I was interested to see in the Woodman book you mentioned; "From ML to C via Modula-3: an approach to teaching programming" which seems like a torturous path to put students through. Anyway, Tate wants to urge this empirical pluralism, that learning languages is good for you whether you use them or not, for purely self-developmental reasons.