in reply to Is Perl the End-All?

Says bladx:
The thought came to me that Perl could very nearly be the BEST resource a programmer could learn how to use, if it can be applied to most any facet of programming necessity.
This is what Paul Graham calls "The blub paradox". It seems to you that Perl is the very best language, but that's only because Perl is what you know. here's what Graham says:

Programmers get very attached to their favorite languages, and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so to explain this point I'm going to use a hypothetical language called Blub. Blub falls right in the middle of the abtractness continuum. It is not the most powerful language, but it is more powerful than Cobol or machine language.

And in fact, our hypothetical Blub programmer wouldn't use either of them. Of course he wouldn't program in machine language. That's what compilers are for. And as for Cobol, he doesn't know how anyone can get anything done with it. It doesn't even have x (Blub feature of your choice).

As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of the languages higher up the power continuum, however, we find that he in turn looks down upon Blub. How can you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y.

...

I know this from my own experience, as a high school kid writing programs in Basic. That language didn't even support recursion. It's hard to imagine writing programs without using recursion, but I didn't miss it at the time. I thought in Basic. And I was a whiz at it. Master of all I surveyed.

This is from Beating the Averages, by Paul Graham. It's worth reading.

--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia

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Re: Re: Is Perl the End-All?
by bladx (Chaplain) on Aug 31, 2001 at 20:46 UTC
    Well actually, I have grown up on other languages besides Perl, and can therefore make a better judgement of which languages I think are more useful than other ones ... hopefully that explains a bit of my thinking, Dominus.

    Andy Summers
[reply]
      I would suspect, bladx, that you (like me) know a number of what I call C-type languages. Languages that are in the model of C and either are simpler or more complex that it, but use it as a base. Pascal, VB, Perl, Java, Javascript, C++, etc. Of there, Perl and C are the clear winners. Perl is for development speed and C is for execution speed and memory usage. (I'd use a C++ compiler to make C strongly-typed, but that's a personal preference.)

      However, Having taken a (very) quick look at LISP and Prolog, for example, those are completely different languages from C, requiring a completely different paradigm. Not having a lot of experience in either, I wouldn't be able to say how their execution/memory usage compares, but I suspect that, for certain applications, it's very favorable.

      Somewhere on PM, someone posted the four basic paradigms of programming languages. They roughly correlate to four different ways of tackling a given problem. I wonder if someone could bring that back up?

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