26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
matt.might.net
26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
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Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
#2We did a similar assignment at University many years ago. I think it was the same assignment, one per day for two weeks. Each time in a different language.
The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick.
Obviously it's a constrained problem set (we didn't have to learn all the ins and outs of each language) but it really opened our eyes to the "commonness" of programming, and free'd us from the tyranny of "I program in x".
Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
#3We did a similar assignment at University many years ago. I think it was the same assignment, one per day for two weeks. Each time in a different language. The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick. Obviously it's a constrained problem set (we didn't have to learn all the ins and outs of each language) but it really opened our eyes to the "commonness" of programming, a…
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Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
#4We did a similar assignment at University many years ago. I think it was the same assignment, one per day for two weeks. Each time in a different language. The goal was to see how similar code is, and how little it matters which language you pick. Obviously it's a constrained problem set (we didn't have to learn all the ins and outs of each language) but it really opened our eyes to the "commonness" of programming, a…
> how little it matters which language
obligatory reference to Landin "The next 700 programming languages" (1966)
Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
#5For context, Matt Might is formerly a professor whose research was in programming languages/program analysis. Professors like to code too!
Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
#6For context, Matt Might is formerly a professor whose research was in programming languages/program analysis. Professors like to code too!
I’ve really missed his blog. I read his posts over and over during grad school.
His story of pivoting from PL research to medical research (and being a star in the field) is quite motivating.
Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
#7No FORTH, APL, Clojure or Rust? My HN bingo card is empty...
Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
#8No FORTH, APL, Clojure or Rust? My HN bingo card is empty...
Well, Common Lisp and Erlang there made up for it.
Clojure and Rust were on their list of strong languages that they didn't end up needing:
> F#, Ocaml, Rust, Perl, Swift, Clojure, Smalltalk
Forth and APL were on the list of probably impractical languages:
> APL / J, Prolog, Forth, m4, COBOL, Fortran, Ada
Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
#9Learning a programming language in 1 day to solve a particular problem isn’t the same as learning it over years to write actual production code. I doubt the author was writing “idiomatic” code and he probably transplanted paradigms from more familiar languages in the newer ones.
But it’s still very useful and I’m sure he learned a lot and absorbed of some of the new languages’ programming styles. You don’t master idiomatic functional programming from one week of writing Haskell, but it does introduce you to basic concepts like functors, lambdas and embedding computation (IO) in data.
Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days
#10No FORTH, APL, Clojure or Rust? My HN bingo card is empty...
I can see skipping APL. Also, Rust could be frustrating if you only had a day. It like saying you are going to learn a new sport every day and skipping snowboarding because while you can always kick or throw a ball badly, just standing up and falling down continuously for a day does not actually teach you anything about snowboarding.
Forth would be a good one though. Both simple and different.