4 ms·

Programming languages shape the way their users think

• Confusion 12y ago
  ... which is why being multilingual gives you a broader perspective and a wider variety of cognitive tools to solve problems.
• dwarman 12y ago
  ... and then out of those specific tools emerges a meta-cognition of language as an abstract, now retargetable even to the point of easily generating new languages where needed, and also of becoming really fast picking up previously unexplored languages for new problems.
• jack9 12y ago
  At what point do you recognize that the model you want to be best is not the best? PHP dominates the landscape because it's the best tool for a large portion of developers (ostensibly newbies). For being concerned and critical about, computer scientists seem to ignore the data that already exists.
  • kedean 12y ago
    The tool many people use isn't always the best one. Most of the world runs on coal for power, but that doesn't mean it's a good choice, it's just the easy one. PHP is not a good choice for anyone, it's the easy one. The only arguments in favor of it are that it is easy to learn (I would say that it is too easy to learn), and that its easy to get set up with. Being easy to set up doesn't make it good, it just reflects on the state of shared hosting as of ~10 year ago when PHP became the amateur webdev standard.
• AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  I kind of checked out on this article once it lumped Go in the same category as OCaml. I mean, they're both less kludgy tools than PHP, but... they're still so far different in approach and philosophy and style and everything that I had a hard time taking the article seriously after that.
  • M8 12y ago
    Imagining OCAML without generics is fun though :). Also he did get that dynamic is only good for prototyping.