Programming Languages YET AGAIN (was Re: How to add reports into Gnucash)

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 03:17:35PM -0400, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
> 
> >What makes Lisp tough is trying to learn it with a mindset derived from 
> >completely different kinds of languages.  Kind of like trying to learn 
> >Japanese while insisting on using English grammar on it.
> > 
> >
> If you are already familiar with a programming language that CAN be used 
> as a purely "functional" language even though it is normally used as a 
> "procedural" language you COULD learn the new way of thinking without 
> having to also be learning a new syntax. But I am not sure whether that 
> would make it harder or easier. Perhaps the new syntax would help your 
> brain with the "this is really different" issue.
> 
> Fairly early on in my learning C after some discussion about what sort 
> of a language was it (really) got challenged to rewrite a small C 
> program from the usual "imperative" form (how C is normally used) into a 
> purely "functional" program with no imperative statements. Yes possible 
> to do. But then I already had some familiarity with functional languages 
> like LISP.

That's the problem with purely functional languages -- there ar a *lot* 
of things that are most easily expressed imperatively.  Reformulating 
them side-effect-free can be really hard; making this efficient can be 
harder still.  But Lisp, and Scheme, aren't purely functional languages.  
If they were, I wouldn't consider using them for anything but toy 
programs.  I use them functionally when that's convenient, which is 
often, but I never stick with that kind of limitation through thick and 
thin.

> 
> Michael
> 
> PS: I am not sure English to Japanese (which I don't know) is an extreme 
> enough example of "different grammar" (does Japanese have nouns and 
> verbs and adjectives, etc as separate elements?.). Perhaps more like 
> English to one of the American Indian languages that does not even have 
> these as separable elements.

Yeah.  Navaho might be better, or Algonquin.  As far as I know, though, 
even those have nouns and verbs and adjectives.  But they use them 
quitge differently.  In Navaho, I'm told, verb tenses refer to how you 
know what you're saying, such as
  "everybody knows"
or
  "I saw it with my own eyes"
or
  "It's a legend from the mists of time".
or
  "The evidence seems to point that way."

If you want to mention time, you have to use an adverb.

This makes accurate translation well-nigh impossible, because the 
translator allways has supply more information just to be grammatical.

For Japanese, there's also a lot of switching around, using different 
parts of speech for the same concepts.  But except for the politeness 
protocols, which are *part of the language*, you can mostly say the same 
things.

-- hendrik