davidson (04/07/83)
I would like to add my voice to others in saying that IF YOU DON'T KNOW A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE WELL, PLEASE DON'T PUBLISH YOUR EVALUATIONS! The ``reviews'' of LISP have been particularly useless, as LISP is an extensible language, and is therefore pretty much immune to superficial criticism. I would like to commend those who keep insisting on the distinction between languages and programming environments. Only traditions within language families keep certain languages compiled, others interpreted, and others somewhere inbetween. The same goes for symbolic debuggers and structure editors. I've seen exceptions to all of the rules, and they greatly change the nature of programming in that environment in their respective language. I would also like to point out another distinction: The distinction bewteen a language and its usage. The more complex languages (Ada, PL/1, etc.) provide mechanisms for nearly anything you might have in mind to do. More sparse languages, e.g., Pascal and LISP merely provide you with some general purpose tools. The usage conventions make the difference. This is particularly true with extensible languages like LISP and SmallTalk, where the language can be learned in a few hours but the usage is continually changing as new control structures and methodologies are being discovered. Unfortunately, the usage of these languages is often poorly documented, e.g., Charniak, et.al.'s recent book Artificial Intelligence Programming is the first decent source I've seen for LISP usage, yet LISP is the second oldest programming langugage. I have learned a rather large number of computer languages (over 24) from most of the major families. Each time I've ventured into a new language family (my first functional language, my first object oriented language, etc.), it has taken me about a year to REALLY be able to understand the language, even though I APPARENTLY learned some of those languages, e.g. LISP, in a couple of hours. If you havn't gone though several major shifts in your experience of a new language, my experience suggests that you may not yet have learned the usage of the new language. -Greg