David Douthitt
CUNA & Affiliates
UNIX Systems Administrator
ddouthitt@cuna.coop
(608) 231-4922
dan@sidhe.org 8/21/02 1:24PM >>>
To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?Folks have already thrown Lisp, OCaml, Prolog, and Japanese into the
mix, and Smalltalk is always floating around. Given that those are
reasonably academic languages (Okay, except for JapaneseI’ll add
a few of the more low-level or odd languages.Forth: Backwards Think You Will! But it’s also a good way to get your
brain around Postscript. And it’s a very different way of thinking
about things.
: NIRVANA
BEGIN FORTH WORDS LOOP ; (
COBOL: None of this wacky (and really twisted) object-oriented
COBOL, but the original. While COBOL is the whipping-boy of the
computer industry, I’d much much rather find out that the code
running my bank or calculating my paycheck was written in COBOL
than in Java or (god forbid) C.
COBOL is at least readable and usable - and after you’ve written in RPG, one stops complaining. Is it any wonder that there is a GNU COBOL and a TinyCobol but no open source RPG? Good riddance
For me, I’ve several languages I’ve always wanted to learn, but I’m not sure how to get going. Here’s my list of langauges yet to be learned (proficiently):
- LISP
- Smalltalk
- Scheme
- Lua
- Eiffel
Funny no one’s mentioned Eiffel yet…
Then there’s FORTH - problem with FORTH is that every dialect is different in significant ways - so the learning curve is not small. Not only that - compare C’s 28 keywords to FORTH - a dialect that I used a while back had 350 words at least.
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At 11:52 PM +0900 8/21/02, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote: