"Dann Corbit" <·······@solutionsiq.com> writes:
> > C++ is by all accounts exceedingly difficult to master.
> By what accounts? I have no problem understanding it, and I'm not a
> genius. There are thousands of commercial programmers and analysts who
> have made the leap. Many times as many as Lisp and Smalltalk put together.
"Just because there are more cockroaches than human beings does not
neccessarily mean that cockroackes are on a higher level of evolution."
> What a load of crap. If you are talking about 'return on investment' C++
> is absurdly higher than Common Lisp. Look at the amount of development
> that is going on in C++ and compare it with what is going on in Lisp.
That's right. But the difference is: you can solve problems in LISP. :-)
> a fool will thing they will get a higher ROI from a study of Lisp, which is
> at least as difficult to master as C++. Go to a bookstore, and see
The problem with LISP is: you need quite some mathematical background
and knowledge of other functional languages to fully appreciate
it. When I first "collided" with LISP, I found it a horrible thing,
wondering how anyone with a bit of common sense could be so masochistic
to use such weird stuff. That time, I did everything in C. (C++ wasn't
available. Later on I learned C++ and first, I really found it great,
but only until I got into contact with Lambda Calculus, Combinatory
Logic and another functional language looking not that horrible. Then
I discovered that problems can be solved in functional languages! Wow!
Languages like C++, Java, etc. somehow seem to exist only to create
yet more problems you have to solve which don't have to do anything
with what you intitially wanted from the machine.
500 lines C++ => 50 lines ML - that's been an experience.
Meanwhile, I do almost anything in functional languages, modtly in
LISP. Sigh.
--
regards,
Thomas Fischbacher - ··@another.gun.de
········@informatik.tu-muenchen.de
In article <···············@hphalle0i.informatik.tu-muenchen.de>,
Thomas Fischbacher <········@hphalle0i.informatik.tu-muenchen.de> wrote:
>"Dann Corbit" <·······@solutionsiq.com> writes:
>> > C++ is by all accounts exceedingly difficult to master.
>> By what accounts? I have no problem understanding it, and I'm not a
>> genius. There are thousands of commercial programmers and analysts who
>> have made the leap. Many times as many as Lisp and Smalltalk put together.
>"Just because there are more cockroaches than human beings does not
>neccessarily mean that cockroackes are on a higher level of evolution."
:)
"Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil."
>The problem with LISP is: you need quite some mathematical background
>and knowledge of other functional languages to fully appreciate
>it. When I first "collided" with LISP, I found it a horrible thing,
>wondering how anyone with a bit of common sense could be so masochistic
>to use such weird stuff. That time, I did everything in C. (C++ wasn't
>available. Later on I learned C++ and first, I really found it great,
>but only until I got into contact with Lambda Calculus, Combinatory
>Logic and another functional language looking not that horrible. Then
>I discovered that problems can be solved in functional languages! Wow!
>Languages like C++, Java, etc. somehow seem to exist only to create
>yet more problems you have to solve which don't have to do anything
>with what you intitially wanted from the machine.
>500 lines C++ => 50 lines ML - that's been an experience.
>Meanwhile, I do almost anything in functional languages, modtly in
>LISP. Sigh.
My experience has been the same.
I started programming in Fortran and PL/I in 1983, then switched to C.
I made an effort to learn C++ when it first came out and was very
enthusiastic at the time. I made another effort several years later
before realizing that it just wasn't helping me get my work done.
Now I use ML for almost everything. Most of my projects are small and
limited by development time; ML has allowed me to finish projects in about
20% of the time it would have taken in C. Without this extra productivity,
I could never have finished some of my projects last year.
--Travis Porco