[Info-vax] Programming languages, was: Re: VMS documentation

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2022-03-18 20:38, abrsvc wrote:
> 
>> And if they only know Fortran, that's all they can do.
>> Simon.
>>
> Horse crap!!

I sortof agree with that. Just because you've only seen one language or 
another does not mean you cannot figure other things out, or do things 
in many different ways.

> I started with an assembly language for the 6502 and the first "real" programming language was FORTRAN.
> Since then, I have successfully coded in many languages (last count 15+).  Don't generalize.

Definitely. One should never generalize.

> I also disagree that the language makes the programmer.  Programming is a way of thinking and logical progression of steps.   Yes these steps may happen in parallel, but fundamentally, programming is just a way to state steps in solving a problem.

Now, sadly, here is where you actually prove Simon right. But again, we 
should not generalize. Just because you don't know does not mean others 
cannot know or figure it out.

And actually, no, programming isn't necessarily what you describe. That 
is one paradigm, and the most common one. But it's not the only one. And 
for some kind of problems, you can gain a lot by not approaching a 
problem that way.

My prime example is Prolog. Which is a programming language you would 
probably struggle a lot with, because you do not describe a program as a 
logical progression of steps. You instead describe things in the form of 
associations or relations, and then you let the language find the 
solution to your stated problem.

Which of course can then happen in many different ways, giving different 
answers, and in different orders.

It's a very interesting language, and I know lots of people have 
problems figuring out how to use it. But once you do, some things 
suddenly become very easy, but different.

Languages like Lisp or Haskell or whatever, is also not really as step 
wise as you think either.

You've basically been working in just one corner of programming, and 
haven't even seen/realized that there are other ways.

> I think that it is much more valuable to learn how to think and break down problems into steps rather than to be an expert in the syntax of a language.  You can easily look up the syntax on how to accomplish what you need to accomplish.  It is much harder to "fit" an elegant technique to a problem just for the sake of using that technique.  And yes, I have seen programmers "find a way" to use a feature of a language even though it was not the right way to get the job done.

Syntax is just a detail. You can look that up in any manual. And yes, if 
you've figured out imperative language concepts, they are all pretty 
much the same. Some have some feature or capability making solving some 
problem a bit easier than others, but there is no significant difference.

But that's not the whole world...

   Johnny