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Of course the premise is flawed. It doesn't stop it from being widespread, however. For many people, one language is enough. I had teachers who told be that le
by loup-vaillant 17y ago
Of course the premise is flawed. It doesn't stop it from being widespread, however. For many people, one language is enough.
I had teachers who told be that learning one language is enough to learn them all (except for the syntax). I have a colleague who wouldn't use anything but C++ for "serious" projects.
[Edit] Could someone tell me where this comment went wrong?
- pmiller2 17y agoI had teachers who told be that learning one language is enough to learn them all (except for the syntax). That sounds like typical academia-speak (assuming you mean to say they were implying all general-purpose languages are essentially interchangeable by Turing-completeness). But if you're going to go down that road, you might as well go all the way and just program Turing machines. Believe me, if you thought assembler on real processor was low-level, nothing beats directly programming a universal Turing machine.
- loup-vaillant 17y agoThey were actually saying that learning Fortran is enough to understand all the important concepts. It was not about Turing completeness. They actually thought that languages are all more or less the same. Maybe they knew about exceptions, like Prolog, but didn't mention them because of their perceived irrelevance. "They" are quite rare among professors, but they do exist. Sometimes, it is the course, not the professor, which implies that Fortran is enough. Such a course made me study algorithms. The syntax was some sort of Pascal. The semantic was first order and imperative. And because no compiler existed for such a language, they acted as if the thing was "language independent".