On 10/15/06, Kevin Olemoh <darkintent / gmail.com> wrote: > I wanted to add that it may not be so advantageous to have so many > programming languages;unlike spoken languages which actually benefit > from their diversity since they are allow humans to create entirely > new concepts. Programming languages are somewhat restricted by how > hardware actually works and hence perform the same functions with > different ways of getting to the same result. Perhaps one method of > dealing with the current trend of programmers being schooled in two or > more languages just to be marketable is to try to standardize the > behavior of various constructs across languages so things work more > the same across the board. Granted this does happen somewhat > naturally already what I am postulating is that it may be advantageous > to actively try to direct this phenomena. > > It would keep things like this from happenning: > > a bunch of languages support += as a shorthand for incrementing accumulators > > A SQL implementation comes along and does not support this relatively > common short hand..WTH Why??? > > Anyway that is a discussion unto itself. Oh, please. Your thoughts here are naż×e, at best. Let's pick on one of the syntax things that Ruby doesn't support: ++. There are very good reasons that Ruby doesn't support this syntactic increment shorthand -- and there's no way to make Ruby support it in a way that doesn't break a lot of other things or is thread safe. (It's also only possible to support the prefix form, not the postfix form.) Language -- whether it's computer language or human language -- changes the way that you think. When I work in C, i think in much lower-level terms. This is the *purpose* of C -- a portable assembly, if you will. When I work in C++, I add a bit of object oriented and template magic to C. My concepts in C++ are still pretty low-level. When I move to shell scripting, I think in different terms yet -- I think in terms of "what tools do I have that will help me do what I must do?" And when I'm in Ruby, I think in terms that are much more complex than I do with almost any other language. You say that a bunch of languages support += -- I can think of at least as many that *don't* support += at all, and even among those that do support it, there are some that are just whacked out. The problem we have isn't that programmers must know two or more languages; it's that there's too many programmers out there who barely know one. I personally know at least fifteen, although I haven't used half of them in years. But I use at least four on a regular basis at work. I have learned a lot from every single language -- and look forward to learning even more so that I can advance the state of *my* art. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/ * austin / halostatue.ca * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/ * austin / zieglers.ca