Neither Lisp nor OCaml is super far afield from what you already know. Here are four suggestions chosen partly for intrinsic interest and partly to stretch your horizons. A logic programming language, probably Prolog. I haven’t found good materials online, but the book The Art of Prolog by Sterling and Shapiro is excellent. The more … Read more
It’s still in use by people like Apple and Sun – take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware.
Look at cSounds and PureData.
It does not have a well-defined meaning. In these types of discussions, “language X is more powerful than language Y” usually means little more than “I like language X more than language Y.” On the other end of the spectrum, you’ll also usually have someone chime in about how any Turing-complete language can accomplish the … Read more
Here are some of the things that made me favour Scala (over, say, usual Java): a) Type inference. The Java way of doing it: Map<Something, List<SomethingElse>> list = new HashMap<Something, List<SomethingElse>>() .. is rather verbose compared to Scala. The compiler should be able to figure it out if you give one of these lists. b) … Read more
Isn’t is bad enough that we have one null?
FYI, I came across this extremely helpful feature comparison chart of different languages which you can program the NXT in: http://www.teamhassenplug.org/NXT/NXTSoftware.html
I think, Wikipedia has got this one very right: A programming language is an artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer. The first sentence is enough to describe what it is: it is an artificial language (that is the root of it) it is designed to … Read more
It should be more common, but I suspect it is not because it makes parsing languages more complex. Benefits: Upholds the principle of least surprise Reads like math is taught Reduces cognitive load (see previous 2 points) Drawbacks: Grammar is more complex for the language Special case syntactic sugar As to why not, my guesses … Read more