Complementary language?

HackingYodel taoiststarter at -nospam-yahoo.com
Sun Dec 26 15:50:17 EST 2004


Thanks for all the suggestions!

I'm going to investigate all of them as time allows.  I must say that 
Eiffel would most certainly expand my mind.  My initial reaction, when
looking at a "Hello World!" program, was "No way!". I had just read
some of SICP and "Pascal is for building pyramids ­ imposing, 
breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks 
into place. Lisp is for building organisms ­ imposing, breathtaking, 
dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of 
simpler organisms into place." sprang to mind, with Eiffel replacing 
Pascal in this quote.  Attempting to be fair, I surfed over to 
eiffel.com.  Eiffel has a lot of "high-minded" concepts, and it's easy 
for a rookie, such as myself, to become inundated.  Ironically, while 
watching Eiffel.com's presentation of "Design by Contract", my Gnome 
desk top's control-panel crashed with a segmentation fault error 
(seconds before the spill about how reliable DBC made Eiffel).  Much I 
could learn from Eiffel.

SICP was another invaluable suggestion!  MIT uses it as part of their 
OpenCourse program, so now I have a complete and free course in addition 
to this excellent text.  Thank you.

I will inspect Fortran, Mozart/Oz, Erlang, AliceML, and all other 
recommendations.  Thanks again for the help.  Perhaps I will be able to 
contribute to the Python community soon.



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