Re: which language for programming

[Erik Sandberg]

On Wednesday 22 November 2006 19:31, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
> Doug Wellington wrote:
> > Why can't you communicate with others using VB and/or AppleScript?  I
> > would submit that it's easier to create a graphical application with
> > VB than just about any other programming language.  If you want to
> > communicate via windows, menus, buttons, etc, what's easier than VB?
> > (And heck, once you learn VB, you can leverage that to write scripts
> > in MS Office apps if you're so inclined...)
>
> Simple---because with VB and/or AppleScript you are tying yourself to
> one platform, or at any rate biasing yourself heavily.  If I write in
> Perl or Python or Ruby, or for that matter C or C++, code is much more
> portable.

I think there are portable implementation of VB (IIRC Mono has one). However, 
I suppose that doesn't help much because AFAIU the main point with VB is that 
Microsoft wrote a nice IDE for it in which it easy to draw windowed 
applications, and that IDE is not portable AFAIK.

> I think the earlier poster who suggested going straight for Scheme may
> have a point.  Not only is it the core language for working with
> Lilypond, but it's a Lisp dialect, and Lisp is both the grandaddy of
> programming and the most flexible language there is.  See for example,
> http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

Another thought struck me: there's a pedagogical point in using statically 
typed languages, because those language teach you never should store 
different types of objects in the same variable, which is good programming 
practise. Both python and scheme (and most other suggestions here) are 
dynamically typed languages. For this reason, Boo may be a good candidate 
(it's more-or-less a python clone with the addition of an intricate static 
typing system); its main drawback is that it's not commonly used yet.

-- 
Erik