[kanandshankar@hotmail.com: learning and evaluating languages]

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

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Some message I received about the Tunes language review.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
To people who ask what is the business model of Free Software, I reply:
"what is the business model of Free Trade?". -- Faré

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From: "anand shankar" <kanandshankar@hotmail.com>
To: fare@tunes.org
Subject: learning and evaluating languages
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 12:57:15 +0000
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Sir ,
       I am a college student and i am greatly impressed by your TUNES 
project and particularly by your review of existing languages.
      It was very recently that i became interested in learning different 
programming languages.Here in India only C/C++  and Java are popular.
Originally i knew only knew C/C++.One day i came across Eiffel language
and that was my first encounter with "invariants" ,"preconditions" and 
"postconditions" etc.That encounter made me realize that by learning new 
programming languages , i was actually widening my programming skills.
I think i would be missing out on a lot of things if i just stick to c/c++.
I have also got myself accquainted with functional programming.I found OCAML 
to be very powerful.My encounter with PERL was distastrous.I found the 
language to be very vast.
(I alsolike learning natural languages;i know basic german;i have learnt 
quite a lot of french by watching TV5)

It is in this regard that i would like your help.You seem to have the 
knowledge
of a lot of programming languages.I would be of great help if you could 
share your experience with these languages with me.
You had listed your TOP languages.Two things are surprising -
1) LISP dialects are first.I found inclusing of ML to be natural but  LISP i 
find surprising.
2)There seem to be no imperative or object oriented languages.
It would be of great help if you could tell me your basis for judging the 
languages.
Like i told you before , i also learn a lot of languages and try to improve 
myself eventhough i don't work as a professional programmer as of yet.But i
keep myself busy be writing small compilers , meddle with opengl etc.
I think you could help me a lot by sharing your vast experience with the 
programming languages.I am of the belief that there is no "bad programming 
language" and one can always learn new things from a language.
Could you suggest me how to go about learning these programming languages
and how to grade them;good literature on "comparing programming languages".
Thanks in Advance,
Anand (kanandshankar@hotmail.com)



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