On 2014-09-15, Travis Scrimshaw <tsc...@ucdavis.edu> 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). >> > > Isn't that the definition of obscure? > >> >> >>> 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. >> > > It doesn't matter which language someone learns that determines how good of > a programmer they are. Oh yes, it does matter. These first exposed to an imperative language are often having difficulties writing functional-style code. I wish I coded in Lisp rather than in Fortran in my first years as a programmer.
I also had to deal with students whose first language was Matlab, and with students who were first taught a subset of C++... (e.g. most of the latter had a huge mental trauma as a result :-)) > However have good command and understanding of the > idiosyncrasies of the languages that a programmer uses is much more > important that what language they learned on. I have never really used lisp > (or learned too much about it), and many of the programmers I know never > have either, but I consider myself a pretty good programmer and I know some > really good ones who (I don't think) know what lisp is. > >> >> >> 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'm pretty sure a good employer will hire someone who only knows C++ (note, > not C) over only known lisp because it is lower-level and is much more > common (and other languages are similar like Java and C#). > > >> >> >>> 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. >> > > I agree they can learn higher level languages easily enough, but there are > more concepts to learn in lower level languages (e.g. memory management). > > Best, > Travis > > -- 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.
