On 1/3/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb / cesmail.net> wrote:
>
> The key to fun in that article, or at least one of them, seems to be the
> rapid feedback that one can get with some languages. Certainly a Lisp or
> Scheme REPL environment or Forth's equivalent, the "outer interpreter"
> and "colon compiler", give that kind of rapid feedback. And Ruby has
> irb, although there isn't really an "IDE" with irb at the core, at least
> none that I'm aware of. In Forth, we used to call this process DATK --
> Design At The Keyboard.

To me, one major component of 'fun' is how well the 'grain' of the
language supports clean, abstract programming and problem solving in
the domain at hand. Ruby is a lot of fun, for example, because its
blocks make control structure abstraction not only easy, but the
*natural* way to solve a problem, because it speaks unix very well
indeed, and because it is sufficiently multiparadigm that you almost
never need to fight the language to do what you want to do.

Lisp and Haskell are both almost as much fun as ruby, but  a major win
for the latter is that it is the first (sufficiently powerful)
language where I've never had to wonder whether I'm using the language
wrong or simply approaching the problem wrong (I've had experiences in
both CL and Haskell where I was actually making a mistake in my
formulation of the problem, but my first instinct was nevertheless to
blame my grasp of the language. Doubtless that will go away as I get
more comfortable in said languages, but with ruby I was comfortable
from day one).

martin