What’s neat about elegant languages (by alaric)
Most people who like to use "unusual" non-mainstream language have to have a motivation for doing so. After all, there are reasons not to - a smaller user community, although that can be a good thing, means less libraries, less support for more unusual platforms, and less likelihood of your programming in that language ever earning you money.
When asked, most will say that they find programming in their chosen language easier, but it can be hard to explain why.
However, in a discussion in IRC recently, I think I may have captured part of it:
- alaricsp: I do a lot of programming in various languages, and I tend to find that the amount of coolness I can do per line in Scheme is higher, and I get less bugs
- alaricsp: As in, I decide to do something complex, sit down and write a hundred lines of scheme, try to run it and get lots of syntax errors due to typos, fix those, then it's semantically bug free about 75% of the time; and in the remaining 25% there's usually just one simple bug (last one was due to me getting confused with some boolean algebra over lists, doing an any? instead of an every? or something like that)
- alaricsp: I start in implementation space and build up in thin layers to get to problem space
- alaricsp: Cheap easy-to-use abstraction means it's cost-effective to have lots of thin layers
- alaricsp: And thin layers are easier to think about, so less buggy
To which somebody else followed up:
- sjamaan: Aye
- sjamaan: I find the barrier to creating an abstraction in OO languages to be very high, for example
- sjamaan: I actually sigh everytime I have to create a new class file!
- sjamaan: Whereas I don't even think about creating a lambda
- sjamaan: I just do it
Sat 9th May 2009 10:53 am 
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