On Sat, 2008-05-10 at 20:32 +0900, Eleanor McHugh wrote:

>  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. 


Oh, definitely.  I'm not saying that said abstractions and layers are a
BAD thing at all!  It's why I've made sure I'm at least passingly
familiar with ~50 programming languages (not proficient: passingly
familiar).  I want to keep my brain flexible with different ways of
thinking about the abstractions.


>  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.


I miss some of the stupid Haskell tricks I can do like trivial function
composition.  I am also beginning to really enjoy Erlang's approach to
parallelism and wishing I could do cool stuff like that in Ruby as
easily.  But overall, yes, I agree with you.  Ruby gives me lots of very
helpful tools for communicating abstractions succinctly and quickly.


>  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 ;)


Going back to point number ... 4 was it?  In my list?  The Lisp
community is why I'm not a Lisper.  I admire the language intensely and
would be a Lisp fanatic myself but for the fact that I despise its
community.  I have never seen such a newbie-hostile, arrogant, unhelpful
set of people in my life.  Whenever I hear a Lisper ask why Lisp is so
unpopular, I always have to suppress the urge to hold up a mirror.
(There are notable exceptions of course.  Richard Gabriel, for example,
is one of the nicest people in any language community.  Sadly the Erik
Naggums of the Lisp community outnumber the Richard Gabriels by about
two orders of magnitude.)

-- 
Michael T. Richter <ttmrichter@[...].com>  (GoogleTalk:
ttmrichter@gmail.com)
It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure
out code. You should be able to read it. (Steve McConnell)