Comment by panxyh
2 years ago
You keep using programming languages instead of programming as an analogy. Is that thought through or do you just throw these two concepts in the same basket?
2 years ago
You keep using programming languages instead of programming as an analogy. Is that thought through or do you just throw these two concepts in the same basket?
It's thought through: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38410024
But it's thought through as a person who is an amateur at best. I've taken literal introductory courses to programming in Fortran, Java, and R, have hacked together two or three VBscript programs, had a very slight one-day introduction to assembler in the Java course, and as a child was briefly in a summer program that had us "programming" a very simple robot (telling it to go certain lengths in certain directions). A former roommate said my pseudocode (when taking the Fortran course) looked like Pascal, and I used to watch him do some Forth programming.
So in terms of programming philosophy I am really, really clueless. But in terms of programming languages what I do have is a basic understanding of how incredibly diverse the languages are. And that a huge amount of this diversity is based on human preferences.
As an analogy to construction. Yes, there are a diverse number of techniques that can be used in constructions (yurts, hay-bail housing, etcetera). One could also draw an analogy to pre-fab construction as modular programming and libraries as kits (or whatever). But for the most part, outside of scale, it seems that most construction effectively standardized on a few "languages", if not a single language.