[racket] The value of a language

My own opinion of this is that people who think that know few,
similar-looking languages (or, perhaps they write Fortran programs in every
language :).

Of course, this statement I agree with wholeheartedly when you think of
Racket, as the idea of a 'library' is closer to what you'd think of as
separate languages in other contexts, but somehow I doubt that's what they
had in mind!

Robby

On Wednesday, May 9, 2012, Grant Rettke wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Hope this is on topic, if it is not a substantive contribution I apologize.
>
> I just want to share a conversation from work. Bunch of experienced
> developers who are all very thoughtful reached the conclusion that the
> most important thing in a language choice is the APIs that come with
> it. Basically talking through it, that is the thing that speeds up
> work, and people can basically "think in any language they like" and
> then "mentally compile it down" to whatever is the implementation
> language. I generally agree in a corporate environment because you do
> want save your customers time and therefore money and I have never
> tried a non-mainstream language there such that I had real evidence
> there is a more productive way to do things.
>
> This was the same day that I finally read about syntax/parse and was
> thinking about how much nicer it would be to use that than the
> plumbing work I had to do to get nice error reporting, so perhaps I
> was more struck with their observation. It was just funny to hear
> everybody keep saying "the language doesn't matter" because it is so
> different than how I think, and how I think other lispers think, and
> even PLT people in general.
>
> I thought this was a funny coincidence because I wanted to talk about
> how great syntax/parse, and well I did talk to my one buddy about it
> :).
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Grant
>
> --
> http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/
> ACM, AMA, COG, IEEE
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