[racket] The value of a language

To follow up on Matthias's thread:

2025: Companies are forced to install soundproofing when the voices of NL
programmers in their 4'x4' cubicles bother their neighbors in the "social
marketing" department

2035: A command reportedly issued by a POTUS "with a bad cold" to national
SIRI causes the first ever worldwide internet shutdown

2045: Langbot creates code to search the past for old/new programming
paradigms

2046: Skynet goes active

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Matthias Felleisen <matthias at ccs.neu.edu>wrote:

>
> 1983: Pascal doesn't have closures, so I built records once I understood
> the concept. But -- and that is a HUGE but -- I didn't really understand
> the concept of a closure until I had programmed in Scheme. In reality I
> couldn't imagine programming with closures when my boss told me it was
> possible and argued we could do it in Pascal.
>
> 1998: C programmers didn't know about objects until they worked in Java
> for a while. I am sure, however, that they could have managed with structs
> and function pointers.
>
> 2012: I am certain that Java-ists don't understand modules like MLers do.
>
> 2020: I also don't think Haskellians understand macros the way Racketeers
> do.
>
> These programmers are just too lazy to immerse themselves in something
> novel and truly learn. Now let's do some real work -- Matthias
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On May 9, 2012, at 4:31 PM, Grant Rettke wrote:
>
> > Java doesn't have a nice module system but most people use IoC
> > containers for the same thing.
> >
> > On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:16 PM, J. Ian Johnson <ianj at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> >> The abstractions and protections an API can provide are entirely fueled
> by the language its implementation (and its consumers) is written in,
> however. Is this not the case?
> >> -Ian
> >> ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Grant Rettke" <grettke at acm.org>
> >> To: "racket" <users at racket-lang.org>
> >> Sent: Wednesday, May 9, 2012 3:42:06 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> >> Subject: [racket] The value of a language
> >>
> >> 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
> >> ____________________
> >>  Racket Users list:
> >>  http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/
> > ACM, AMA, COG, IEEE
> >
> > ____________________
> >  Racket Users list:
> >  http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
>
>
> ____________________
>  Racket Users list:
>  http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/attachments/20120509/87a7ee6b/attachment.html>