learning and evaluating languages

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2001 at 12:57:15PM +0000, anand shankar wrote:
>       I am a college student and i am greatly impressed by your TUNES 
> project and particularly by your review of existing languages.
I'm personally more impressed by what remains to be done than by what
has been thrown around already. Maybe that's why the project lags.

> i have learnt quite a lot of french by watching TV5
I personally don't like the stuff they broadcast very much.

I would be of great help if you could 
> share your experience with these languages with me.

> You had listed your TOP languages.
Yes, and following your message, I've updated it, for better or for worse.

> I am of the belief that there is no "bad programming language"
I wouldn't go that far. There *are* bad programming languages.
You can still learn from them, though not much, by contrasting them
with better languages (see Pascal vs C and Pascal vs ML; see Tcl vs Python).

> Could you suggest me how to go about learning these programming languages
> and how to grade them;good literature on "comparing programming languages".
Good question. Unhappily, I'm unaware of generic litterature on the subject.
There are the specific articles listed on the site, plus discussions in
mail and usenet archives, but that's about all I know.

Yours freely,

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
There cannot be Ethics without Models of possible behaviors, and Imagination
to explore them. [Corollary: there is no Ethics for an all-knowing God,
but there are Ethics for mostly-ignorant but nevertheless thinking humans]