begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 05:00:52PM -0800: [snip] > There are many languages (forth, tcl.tk) that have a preternatural > ability to make a certain kind of knotty problem dissolve into > simplicity. This is why I try to avoid language wars (some are too much > fun to stay out of altogether). I think the smart money decides what > type of programming problem s/he has fun attacking and then selects > languages to learn accordingly.
I'm with Lan (and Andrew) on this. Some languages make the solution to some problems trivial and/or obvious. No language makes all problems trivial and/or obvious. Any sufficiently powerful programming language is equivalent to any other programming, given enough effort. Note that this equivalence is not in real-world performance terms, nor in programmer efficiency terms, but mere that it can arrive at the same answer. You can write a compiler in COBOL, f'r instance. The only reason to do so would be to demonstrate that yes, it can be done. -Stewart "The third problem you should tackle in a lisp is mergesort" Stremler -- KPLUG-List mailing list [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
