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This is http://paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html http://paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html in a nutshell. Every language has to decide how much it expects people to learn, b
by erik_seaberg 6y ago
This is http://paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html http://paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html in a nutshell. Every language has to decide how much it expects people to learn, because that’s how it empowers experts. Knowing an easy language is like carrying an empty toolbox.
- gonzo41 6y agoIs it though? I would think the tools in the toolbox would be the std Lib?
- erik_seaberg 6y agoIf a language is missing Bloom filters or epoll_wait(2), anyone can offer that in a fairly self-contained library. But if a language is missing something like lambdas, pattern matching, exception handling, move semantics, or coroutines, that’s a lot harder to add in a usable and efficient way without actually extending the grammar and the code generator. Those are the things that make a language harder to learn at first but then replace a lot of boilerplate that should (usually) be beneath our notice.