On 10 May 2008, at 07:31, Michael T. Richter wrote:
>  Church's model of calculation is far more appealing to me and the  
>  languages based on it -- Lisp (arguably: there's some evidence that  
>  McCarthy stumbled over this rather than deliberately trying to model  
>  Church), Haskell, etc. -- are increasingly the way I like to work.   
>  But it's all smoke and mirrors.  Underneath it all is a von Neumann  
>  machine masquerading as a Church lambda expression engine.

Which of course drives home the point that all languages are about  
useful abstraction, allowing those who use them to discuss problem  
spaces without drowning in detail. In my experience Ruby is very good  
at this even though it lacks some of the abstraction mechanisms I like  
in other languages (such as Icon's goal direction), but another  
developer's view may differ completely.

Why? Because language is not just a means of communicating between two  
or more abstract and indistinguishable entities but a means of  
transferring information between separate knowledge spaces in a manner  
that will allow them to move towards a common representation of a  
given problem domain. Its efficacy is therefore dependent on both the  
structure of the language itself and the peculiar topography of all  
the knowledge spaces.

In more concrete terms, there are programmers for whom Python is a  
much closer fit to their stored knowledge base than Ruby, and vice  
versa. It is therefore easier for them to investigate a given problem  
domain using the one language than the other except in cases where the  
problem domain itself is significantly more compatible with the other  
language.

The same logic explains why some people love Lisp above all other  
languages, and others would happily consign it to the bin of  
'academic' languages ;)


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
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raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason