Robin Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:.....
Well your utility function seems to be related to "learn more approaches to programming".
Which part of "if" do you find hard to parse?
no part
I suspect there may be some programming language measure which would push really high level languages way up. Simply
"Language Level" as defined in <http://www.theadvisors.com/langcomparison.htm> (first google hit for "language level" _without_ quotes) might be a starting point. If one were to study accurately (as opposed to "eyeball it", as theadvisors.com does too often) LL for, say, Lisp, Oz, OCAML, Ruby, Perl, Python, I doubt one would find statistically significant consistent differences across a broad range of domains, though.
so if these languages are equivalent the cpu measure might have some value ;)
....
I agree entirely with this last, but this is about language comparisons and if we're being objective we need to do some measurements. If this is impossible then discussion reduces to 'my language is better than yours' which is pretty futile.
I do not agree with the underlying axiom that all human endeavours _must_ be numerically measurable or else can't be meaningfully
.....
I take this to mean that comparisons can be done some other way. If so a rationalist such as myself would want them used. Discussing Wittgenstein will probably not assist me if logic/mathematics can't. Human languages are also not comparable numerically, but that doesn't stop linguists from comparing and classifying them. I suppose there must be an equivalent dissection for the fundamental concepts of CS languages.
It's not _conceptually impossible_ to measure the didactical values of different endeavours in terms of enhancing skills at some given target tasks; it _is_, however, prohibitively costly, in most cases, to perform properly controlled double-blind experiments of this nature. In this case, as in most other similar ones in real life, we're not even given a precise set of target tasks, just (as is perfectly reasonable) a generic potential desire to _learn about different approaches to programming_.
I was thinking that perhaps indirect measures might assist; perhaps teachability, popularity etc could be used. I work with some student interns. They are asked to learn haskell, their teachers like it and the students mostly hate it. I suspect that Oz has more 'features' so teachers will like it.
I think it would be silly to try to stop people from desiring to learn something even when they can't quantify the eventual success at such learning endeavours.....
I'm certainly not attempting to stop any doing anything.
Alex
-- Robin Becker -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
