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Larry Wall: On programming languages

• davidw 19y ago
  His reasons for Tcl "languishing" were true until about 10 years ago, when 8.0 came out. Tcl was doing quite well then, and only started "languishing" later. It's a long story, sometime I'll write up my somewhat peripheral view of it.
• brlewis 19y ago
  Scheme (via DrScheme) caters to mere mortals more than any other programming language ever has. In every powerful language, it's easy for a typo to create a valid program, but one that doesn't do what you intended. Usually you get an obscure error message related to the advanced feature you accidentally invoked. DrScheme takes you through a series of learning languages, each increasingly powerful. Mistakes in the early languages create helpful error messages. You don't get a better on-ramp than that.