do...until wisdom needed...

[Alex Martelli]

"John Flynn" <transpicio at yahoo.com.au> wrote in message
news:mf5K6.3221$ZJ.121045 at ozemail.com.au...
    ...
> [*] Alex: since you can't quite finger your personal reasons for not
wanting
> to use Lisp/Scheme - even though they were strong early influences, I
wonder
> whether, rather than being permanent, early influences (like old clothes
and
> old loves) become something that one "grows out of".

Maybe.  Lisp is what got me hired for my first job (at Texas
Instruments), but the software for my thesis had been first
prototyped in APL, then recoded in Fortran and VAX assembly,
and what that software "compiled" was AHPL, a hardware
description language with some similarities to APL.  A good
Pascal implementation was what I really yearned for, and I
was one of the very first Borland customer as soon as Turbo
Pascal got launched -- by that time I was with IBM Research,
struggling to get Pascal/VS accepted in a community more
used to Fortran, PL/I, APL2, and some 370 assembly language
where needed.  I count my first meeting with Rex (the
original internal name of what later became Rexx) as one
of these "early influences" too, as Mike Cowlishaw worked
in another European research centre for IBM, so that
community looked upon it with some favour (is there an
IH syndrome to oppose to NIH?-) -- the 370-assembly sources
for that interpreter were truly masterful, as I recall.
Meanwhile I had met with non-imperative-oriented languages,
particularly Sequel (later to become SQL) and Prolog, some
FP (Backus', and a thing called DWIM, IBM internal only I
believe), and back to Fortran too for "supercomputing"
(vectorized & parallelized numerical computation)...

Given this congeries of programming-language styles I was
influenced by, early on, I guess it DOES count as something
of a confirmation of your hypothesis that later I found
myself relying on C and C++ more than any other language
for my daily work, for years... C++ is still what I mostly
get paid for, actually.  Hard to find languages farther from
all poles in that "early influences" set -- Fortran & its
variants, APL & ditto, Lisp & ditto, PL/I, assembly ones,
Pascal & friends, scripting (Rexx), SQL, Prolog, FP...


> The fact that you chose a _completely_ unfamiliar language - Modula-2 -
> tends to support the hypothesis...

Hmmm, I saw it as an evolution of my beloved Pascal, actually.

Looking back over those early years, scripting languages, or
Pascal and variations thereof when scripting was not feasible,
was what I used by choice, when I had no external constraints,
nor special reasons to use special-purpose approaches such
as SQL or Prolog.


Alex