Using Common Lisp in Emacs

Posted Nov 16, 2023 18:32 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: Using Common Lisp in Emacs by Wol
Parent article: Using Common Lisp in Emacs

You know the quote about "BASIC considered harmful"?

I do.

I also know people who studied computer science in the 1990s having had their first exposure to computer programming be 8-bit microcomputer BASICs; quite a few of those BASICs were arguably worse than the Dartmouth BASIC of 1975 that Dr Dijkstra was familiar with.

Their minds have never struck me as "mutilated".

Using Common Lisp in Emacs

Posted Nov 16, 2023 23:02 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Well, my programming language of choice is DataBASIC.

But as I say, my point is not that one language is better or worse than another, but that it shapes the way you see the world. The first languages you are taught often have a major impact on how easily you learn others. My first language was FORTRAN, and I'm sure (if you know FORTRAN), you would see the heritage even in the code I write today, 40 years on. As a simple example, when writing C I almost always use arrays, not pointers ... they may be functionally identical (near enough), but that's what seems natural to me. (And when given a C programming test by a recruitment consultant, my colleague and I got some of the highest scores the consultant had seen ...)

Cheers,
Wol