I think what Prolog, SQL, Lisp, or even J really offer is cheap exploratory development. I am tremendously productive sitting in front of a REPL with access to

I think what Prolog, SQL, Lisp, or even J really offer is cheap exploratory development. I am tremendously productive sitting in front of a REPL with access to data. Even with my Ruby hacking, I tend to be playing with 1 to 4 lines of code in irb while building my scripts and tools. I have not had the opportunity to build a big production system with any of these languages though. I wonder if some of the reason the OO enterprise languages work and hang on is that they facilitate understanding and communication between developers. I hate the amount of boilerplate code that seems to wrap around code examples I see in Java and C# sometimes. I was looking at a tutorial just yesterday that boiled down to declare an array of values, use a matrix of these other values, and apply these functions to the matrix until convergence occurs. The amount of jumping I was doing between different Java class files and static functions was completely an impediment to the point of the tutorial, which was to demonstrate the logic of the process. OTOH, I was able to jump around and follow the points. But I really think it could have been more aptly demonstrated in a few lines of code in another language. Thinking of this interview with Arthur Whitney and this topic: "BC To ask a slightly broader question, what is the con- nection between computer language and thought? To what degree does our choice of how we express software change the way we think about the problem? AW I think it does a lot. That was the point of Ken Iverson’s Turing Award paper, “Notation as a Tool of Thought.” I did pure mathematics in school, but later I was a teaching assistant for a graduate course in computer algorithms. I could see that the professor was getting killed by the notation. He was trying to express the idea of different kinds of matrix inner products, saying if you have a directed graph and you’re looking at connections, then you write this triple nested loop in Fortran or Algol. It took him an hour to express it. What he really wanted to show was that for a connected graph it was an or-dot- and. If it’s a graph of pipe capacities, then maybe it’s a plus-dot-min. If he’d had APL or K as a notation, he could have covered that in a few seconds or maybe a minute, but because of the notation he couldn’t do it." http://mags.acm.org/queue/20090203?pg=12#pg16 http://mags.acm.org/queue/20090203?pg=12#pg16