Re: Beginner's Language?

[Markus Mottl <mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at>]

In comp.lang.functional Andreas Krennmair <a.krennmair@aon.at> wrote:
> The problem is that Lisp is in no way similar to a natural language.

Same is true for all _programming_ languages. Let's not try to maintain
the illusion that programming languages are, could be, or even should be
similar to natural language. Natural language is highly ambiguous and
imprecise, which surely does not make it a good choice for programming
tasks.

> And natural language can be understood easier than some functional,
> theoretical stuff with a unique concept like Lisp.

Sure: you have had about two decades of training, several hours a
day. This definitely makes you good at speaking natural language.
Natural language more easily understood than Lisp? Try to learn Chinese
and tell me again...

Furthermore, I wouldn't regard Lisp as particularly theoretically
inspired, at least not if you compare it to "real" functional languages
like e.g. Haskell.

And yes, this "theoretical" stuff is remarkably readable. Go and look for
yourself:

  http://www.haskell.org

Or try a language from the ML-family, e.g.:

  http://www.ocaml.org

> I was bored in the beginning, because I already knew Pascal, but then
> the teacher explained me that they chose to teach Pascal because it
> is so easy to read and to understand and it still has so many things
> common with other languages.

The true reason most likely is that he had learnt Pascal himself in
school and therefore also uses it for teaching.

> Lisp has hardly anything in common with natural
> languages. Or could you express "My girlfriend's name is Suzy and her age
> is 17" as readable as this in Lisp:
> $girlfriend{'name'} = "Suzy";
> $girlfriend{'age'} = 17;

Don't cheat yourself. There is absolutely no reason why a language like
Perl should be considered anywhere close to natural language. And yes,
I'd say that most well-designed languages make tasks like handling
records significantly easier and safer than Perl.

Take this Lisp-example. First we define a structure to describe persons:

  (defstruct (person) (name) (age))

Now we create a value for your girlfriend:

  (make-person :name "Suzy" :age 17)

To be clear, I am not a particular friend of Lisp and strongly prefer
other (functional and logic) languages. But I just wanted to show that
your claim is not justified.

Other languages also seem much more "natural" to me than your
Perl-example, e.g.:

OCaml with tuples:

  let my_girlfriend = "Suzy", 17

Or (with more structure for readability):

  type person = { name : string; age : int }

  let my_girlfriend = { name = "Suzy"; age = 17 }

None of these examples looks more "theoretical" or less "natural" than
yours. It's probably best if you just take a look at the documentation
of these and other languages, play around a bit, and maybe you'll find
that these languages are much more elegant than you initially thought...

Best regards,
Markus Mottl

-- 
Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl