Comments on: Languages that are easy to pick back up

By: human mathematics

human mathematics — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 06:55:15 +0000

Yes, \infty is even harder to remember because it’s ∞ in HTML.

By: crntaylor

crntaylor — Sat, 09 May 2009 13:31:37 +0000

Of course, LaTeX’s sometimes bizarre abbreviations can be easily solved by including a custom package containing a bunch of lines like

\def\infinity{\infty}

and so forth. Almost all mathematicians that I know do something like this. I agree with your general sentiments though – good post.

By: gappy

gappy — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:26:13 +0000

I feel that languages that are easy to pick back up are those that are easy to pick up the first time. I wanted to offer a reply to John Venier regarding English. As a non-native speaker, I found English way easier both to learn and to remember than German with respect to grammar, and much harder with respect to phonetics. Same with English versus Russian. So, my experience with natural languages is consistent with my experience with programming languages. Latex/C/Python/R/Matlab: easy to learn and remember. C++: hard to learn, remember, use. One feature that makes C++ hard is its sprawling, vast syntax and the many programming styles. Had it strictly enforced template programming, it would have been much easier.

By: John

John — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:33:46 +0000

I used to think differently about the analogy between programming languages and human languages. I agreed with Larry Wall's Natural language principles in Perl that languages need to be easy to use rather than easy to learn. Learn once and use forever. That line of reasoning holds for someone who uses only one programming language and uses it continually for years. But if programming is only part of your job or if you have to use multiple languages, it matters how hard it is to (re)learn a language.

By: John Venier

John Venier — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:53:26 +0000

Dunno about Mathematica — never had a license — but I’ve heard English is hard to learn. Full of exceptions, especially in spelling / pronunciation. But it is common. Reminds me of Larry Wall’s remark about Perl being written in C — not because C is a good language, but because it is ubiquitous.

Python sounds good but I don’t know if I could get used to working in a language where the amount of contiguous whitespace is meaningful and variations in it are part of the language. IIRC even Perl closed a loophole allowing the space character to be used as a text delimiter, much to the dismay of Perl poets, in the interests of more legible code. Which for Perl is unusual.