On Saturday, September 13, 2014 9:43:46 AM UTC-7, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd) wrote: > > .... >
> But the fact remains that Lisp is quite an obscure languge. > I'm not sure what you mean by obscure --- I'll assume that you are just observing that most programmers are unfamiliar with it. They are instead familiar with C, Java, Basic, (see the tiobe survey). > Very few outside computer science students learn it. > Regardless of the obscurity, students who take a course or study the Abelson-Sussman book are likely to be much much better programmers than otherwise. That book happens to use Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. It doesn't matter if they eventually end up writing C code. Or python. Whereas learning C++, C, Python, MATLAB, Labview etc is likely to be > beneficial for employment, the same is not true of Lisp. > If the only thing you have to offer is "I learned C", then you don't have much. An employer would have to be pretty dim to not realize that if you know a few programming languages, you can learn one more in a short time. A good employer might hire a programmer to write C code BECAUSE the programmer knew Lisp. > I don't think a program like could exist if developers needed to learn > Lisp first. > I think you left out the word "Sage" in there. The program Maxima exists, and most serious developers very likely know Lisp. Same for Axiom, Reduce. A programmer already skilled in another higher level language can generally pick up Lisp fairly easily, since it is extraordinarily "regular" in syntax and semantics. RJF > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
