Programming
2007-11-28 21:45![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexibeastAmongst my many silly behaviours is a desire to learn as wide of variety of approaches to programming as possible. Practically speaking, this translates into constantly checking out a variety of programming languages. Consequently, when i was kept up all night recently by a cold, and i didn't have a clear enough head to do some Kabbalah-related reading, i ended up starting to play around with Forth1. Since i've not done any assembly programming, having to think in terms of stack manipulation (beyond basic push / pop operations) is an interesting challenge. Having said that, i suspect that Forth's stack-based approach is what contributes to it having a certain amount of elegance2; and i'm definitely a sucker for elegance in programming. Which is why i love Perl - i often find it allows for elegant solutions3, despite the regular bagging-out it gets from various quarters. i don't want to be cramped by a language that won't let me do certain things because other programmers might (or would) use them incompetently . . . .
1. Forth actually influenced the development of PostScript, a programming language even though most of the time it's used in the context of page layout.
2. Although i confess that i feel it's aesthetically marred when people write Forth in upper-case, even though it's case-insensitive.
3. Not least because it doesn't restrict itself to a particular programming paradigm. i like Lisps, and Scheme in particular, for the same reason. Although i think the problem is not so much when a language restricts itself to a particular paradigm, but when it does it in an ugly way; so that, for example, Smalltalk is an OO language that appeals to me, whereas Java doesn't.
1. Forth actually influenced the development of PostScript, a programming language even though most of the time it's used in the context of page layout.
2. Although i confess that i feel it's aesthetically marred when people write Forth in upper-case, even though it's case-insensitive.
3. Not least because it doesn't restrict itself to a particular programming paradigm. i like Lisps, and Scheme in particular, for the same reason. Although i think the problem is not so much when a language restricts itself to a particular paradigm, but when it does it in an ugly way; so that, for example, Smalltalk is an OO language that appeals to me, whereas Java doesn't.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 00:52 (UTC)Love and Huggles,
Sacred Harlot XxX.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 06:49 (UTC)