Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

matt.might.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#14

Post by lamida »

azhenley wrote: post #6
maxiepoo wrote: post #5

For 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.

I have been reading Matt' blog for quite long too. I read his post on his son condition but never really noticed if he really switch his academic careers for his son. I am pasting the really motivating video sharing the story [1] and a NY times article here [2].

[1] https://www.facebook.com/freethinksuperhuman/videos/15306506...

[2] https://archive.is/l7pCA

Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#15

Post by ModernMech »

bruce511 wrote: post #2

We 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…

Curious which languages you used. If they were C, C++, Java, and Python then I could see how they could blur together if you squint. Different syntax, similar semantics.

But if those languages are C, APL, Erlang, ML and Lisp then I would expect the lesson would be the design space of languages is much larger than the popular imperative languages would have you believe.

Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#16

Post by spikej »

bruce511 wrote: post #2

We 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…

We did the same but the idea was to do it in different paradigms: iterative, OO, functional, etc. And the code was very different

Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#17

Post by dfinninger »

ModernMech wrote: post #15
bruce511 wrote: post #2

We 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…

Curious which languages you used. If they were C, C++, Java, and Python then I could see how they could blur together if you squint. Different syntax, similar semantics. But if those languages are C, APL, Erlang, ML and Lisp then I would expect the lesson would be the design space of languages is much larger than the popular imperative languages would have you believe.

Sure, but in university that can be a useful exercise, whatever the language. There are many commonalities in just about every language. Learning your first language is hard, you’re second is freeing. At least personally I’ve found that the more languages I study, the easier it gets to pick up a new one, specifically because of the commonalities. Sure, Haskell and Ruby are really different, but when you try to pick up Elixir you’ve got a lot of common ground.

Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#18

Post by mattmight »

azhenley wrote: post #6
maxiepoo wrote: post #5

For 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.

Thank you for the kind words!

I missed blogging too, so I set a New Year’s resolution in January to write at least two blog posts this year. It had been over seven years since my last!

I still hadn’t written one by November, but now I’ve got three for the year.

I’m optimistic I can keep it up now.

Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#20

Post by galangalalgol »

bruce511 wrote: post #2

We 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…

Even for a one day task it seems language choice could make it much easier or harder depending on the nature of the task. Text formatting and parsing, vector/tensor math, parallelism, network io, all those things vary drastically in difficulty depending on the language chosen. Then, if there are any performance constraints on the problem that is another clear discriminator.
Post reply on HN