I agree to all the rest of your post, but this:
Am 16.02.21 um 09:57 schrieb Tarjei Bærland:
I am not sure I agree that a language like Scheme or Logo or Brainfuck, with
their small number of building blocks, would be harder to learn.
is strange. I'm not sure, have you actually looked at Brainfuck? Maybe
there is also confusion what means "learning" a programming language.
For me, learning a language does not mean to remember the rules and
keywords, but to be able to write useful programs. Indeed, Brainfuck
with its 8 commands is easy to remember, but it comes at a very high
price: you can't do anything useful with it with reasonable effort. It
is unusable even for pure computer science stuff. It is easy to see that
BF is Turing complete, so please write a BF program to compute the
ackermann function. Should be easy, just three rules ;) I'd definitely
choose Python to do it here.
In that sense, Scheme also appears to be the Brainfuck of functional
programming to me. It is not much more than the pure untyped lambda
calculus, and by definition this allows you to compute anything, just
like Brainfuck is a Turing machine. Actually it is impressive that you
can write actual useful code with such a minimalist language (infix
math? Pure bloat!). OTOH it feels like "assembly" compared to more
evolved functional languages like, e.g. Haskell.
Christian
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