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26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

matt.might.net

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Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#22

Post by mattmight »

redrobein wrote: post #19

> C++ [no experience (beyond meta-programming)] Curious about this line if op is here.

I’ve never written any serious software using C++.

But, I did once learn how to do template meta-programming:

https://matt.might.net/articles/c++-template-meta-programmin...

Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#25

Post by nerdponx »

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.

APL might be an outlier here. For the rest, I think the difference lies more in the standard libraries of those languages than the languages themselves. Yes, differences in core language design start to matter when you are considering performance, or structuring larger applications, but for simpler scripts, you're mostly dealing with the standard library.

On the other hand, differences will start to show them selves after you spend a while noodling with your script, refactoring it a couple of times and deliberately seeking out opportunities to use language-specific features in the process. This expands the exercise to something more like "a language a week" instead of "a language of day", which is obviously a bit more of a time commitment. But if you want to get value out of a "polyglot" programming exercise like this, I think that's what you really need to do. Otherwise I think you learn lessons that are only correct at surface level.

Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#26

Post by mattmight »

Hovertruck wrote: post #24

A note to the original author, it looks like you're including the inputs with your solutions on github which the AoC folks request that you not do: https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/wiki/faqs/copyright/in...

Woops -- I'll take those down. Thanks for pointing that out.

Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#27

Post by mattmight »

medo-bear wrote: post #23

great to see prof. might writing about programming again! im curious what he thinks about the ergonomics of the languages he used

Thanks!

I have a part two planned to comment more about the languages / days themselves.

This post was just getting too long to include it here.

Re: 26 Programming Languages in 25 Days

#28

Post by jezzamon »

Nice!! I needed to understand some go scripts with work so I used Advent of Code as an opportunity to learn it as a new language and solve the next problem using it. Unfortunately that day's problem was more difficult than the rest so it took me more than a day to solve it, but it was a pretty nice way to ramp up on a new language!
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