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I wish people would stop comparing programming languages to Hammers. It's a meaningless meme. Yes, they are tools, but comparing them to Hammers is 100% ridic
by sbov 8y ago
I wish people would stop comparing programming languages to Hammers. It's a meaningless meme. Yes, they are tools, but comparing them to Hammers is 100% ridiculous.
A language is not a hammer. It is a tool. You know what else are tools? Chainsaws, databases, lasers, and tunnel boring machines that cost tens of millions of dollars.
There are plenty of conferences about tools.
- smnplk 8y agoYou need to go further and accept that programming languages are also not tools.
- voltagex_ 8y agoIf they're not tools, then what are they? Where do you draw the line?
- aswanson 8y agoMental problem solving paradigms.
- ken 8y agoThey're languages, or notations. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notation_for_differentiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notation_for_differentiation there's different schools of thought on what's easiest to read, while the fundamentals are essentially the same. Calculus is a tool, but how we write it is just the notation. Similarly, computer programming (or perhaps a subfield like functional programming) is the tool, and a particular language is just the notation for writing it down.