> On May 2, 2024, at 6:55 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2 May 2024 at 00:51, Fred Cisin via cctalk
> <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>
>> What would our world be like if the first home computers were to have had
>> APL, instead of BASIC?
>
> To be perfectly honest I think the home computer boom wouldn't have
> happened, and it would have crashed and burned in the 1970s, with the
> result that microcomputers remained firmly under corporate control.
>
> I have been watching the APL world with interest since I discovered it
> at university, and I still don't understand a word of it.
>
> I've been watching Lisp for just 15 years or so and I find it unreadable too.
>
> I think there are widely different levels of mental flexibility among
> smart humans and one person's "this just requires a small effort but
> you get so much in return!" is someone else's eternally impossible,
> unclimbable mountain.
That sounds right to me.
> After some 40 years in computers now, I still like BASIC best, with
> Fortran and Pascal very distant runners-up and everything else from C
> to Python is basically somewhere between Minoan Linear A and Linear B
> to me.
Well, Linear B isn't that hard, it's just Greek. :-)
My guess is that the languages you use routinely are the ones that work best,
and which languages those are depends on where you work and on what projects.
For example, I don't *like* C (I call it a "feebly typed language") and C++ not
either, but my job uses these two plus Python.
Now Python is actually my favorite (though recently I've done a bunch of work
in FORTH). I like to mention that, in 50 years or so, I have only encountered
two programming languages where I went from "no knowledge" to "wrote and
debugged a substantial program" in only one week -- Pascal (in graduate school)
and Python (one job ago).
paul
