Comments on: Today in the Intertweets (Jan 20th Ed)

By: tbatchelli

tbatchelli — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:07:18 +0000

Keith, I agree with you that the question of whether it is worth to learn a language or not is a chicken or egg problem. When you learn a new language like Lisp, your brain changes in the process; you see things that you didn’t see before. You see ways of solving problems that you didn’t see before, and you will most likely be working at a different level of abstraction. Unfortunately you cannot explain the gains of learning a new language to someone who is new to it. I mean, you can explain the benefits, but the listener won’t really grasp them. Not until they learn the language and write a good amount of code with it.

I thought your answer was on the spot highlighting that the question cannot be answered truthfully with a feature by feature comparison. It wouldn’t do justice to any language.

By: Keith Irwin

Keith Irwin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:55:00 +0000

I suspect that emotional resonance is the way we pick the languages we love. The day job is another matter. And what better way to illustrate the ineffability of such things? Paradoxes, broken metaphors, and circular logic.

Like Windows vs Macs. You’ll never have a solid, completely rational reason to try the one you don’t normally use. You just have to be curious.

And maybe that would have been a better answer. (Well, and some proofreading.)

By: tbatchelli

tbatchelli — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:25:40 +0000

You are absolutely right! And with this it makes two days in a row that I forget one link :(

Thanks for noticing!

By: indy

indy — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:19:46 +0000

There’s no link for ‘Mashups Using Clojure’ but I’m assuming it’s: http://nakkaya.com/2009/12/17/mashups-using-clojure/