Oddly, and this was a long time ago, I found that LISP helped me understand OO when I was learning Java. I had previously done all procedural languages -- BASIC, Pascal, C -- and the "indirectness" of LISP was helpful for me in letting go of my need to own the program counter at all times. I had done a little AppleScript, and that was an early OO gateway for a lot of people too.
One of the things that's really helpful about learning new languages is mental flexibility. My favorite example is to ask "how do you add 1 to every item in a list?" Most developers will think in terms of a while or for-next loop. In LISP, the cleanest way to do it is to write a function that adds 1 to the first member and then calls itself recursively with the rest of the list. Which would be batty in Java, of course, but after a deep dunk in LISP's recursion-land, you'll be more willing to adopt it elsewhere when it makes sense to (like parsing a tree structure, even in a procedural or OO language). The Prags put up a wiki to help pick the 7 languages. I'm pleased as punch they picked Prolog, even if it did almost flunk me out of college. Anyone who's been intrigued by Drools for Java should be interested too. That said, the language I voted for was assembly. I think it's wrong that developers don't even know what a register is anymore, or have a sense of how their code is going to be compiled for and executed on the CPU. --Chris On Apr 29, 9:56 am, Wildam Martin <mwil...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have learned about Lisp in school but that was one of the languages > I was sure I would never use in a real project. Maybe it is my kind of > thinking or just a personal preference but I really don't like that > functional stuff. I find it less readable and have a few other > complaints I can hardly put into words. Maybe I should give such a > language really a try. But it is not that I didn't look at them at > all. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
