The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (on linguistic determism) has been either refuted outright (in its strong version), or shown to be essentially devoid of content (weak version). In terms of programming languages, you do not have to use (or to have ever even learned) a functional programming language to apply the concepts of functional programming (and s/functional/OO/). The programming language you choose (meaning general purpose, not specialized niche languages here) doesn't limit the solution set so much as it limits the solution set that can be expressed naturally in that language. Think about it: C is not an OO language, nor does it have hashes as a primary type; but with it you can write new languages that do.

If anything, the Sapir-Whorf hyposthesis is simply backwards: What and how we think shapes our language. The Innuit may have more words for snow (but nowhere near the 40 or so claimed by some reports, more like 7 to 10), but not more concepts or recognitions of different kinds of snow. We just require more descriptive phrases where their language uses simple or compound words. When differences in snow types are a more important part of daily life, one might expect such huffman-like encodings to be reflected in the language.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: don't { use Perl } by Anonymous Monk
in thread don't { use Perl } by erikharrison

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