On Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 12:13:16AM -0800, David M. Cook wrote:
I don't generally find this a problem, but maybe I'm just working around
problems subconciously? I don't know.
Paul Graham describes this as the "Blub paradox". The idea is that a
programmer learns to think about problems in the language they are
learning. As such, they don't think about things that can't be represented
in the languages that they know.
Quoting Paul:
Programming languages teach you not to want what they cannot
provide. You have to think in a language to write programs in it,
and it's hard to want something you can't describe. When I first
started writing programs-- in Basic-- I didn't miss recursion,
because I didn't know there was such a thing. I thought in Basic.
I could only conceive of iterative algorithms, so why should I miss
recursion?
If you don't miss lexical closures (which is what's being made in
the preceding example), take it on faith, for the time being, that
Lisp programmers use them all the time. It would be hard to find a
Common Lisp program of any length that did not take advantage of
closures.
- ANSI Common Lisp, Chapter 1.
David
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
