Irrational Exuberance

You are writing a comment about You Only Learn the First Time, here is a quick summary:

It's easy to get caught in the cycle of programming language acquisition or library re-implentation circuit. I'm here to propose a better way for spending our programming time to create more useful projects, and to become more versatile programmers.

You are responding to this comment written by Mikael Jansson on November 7th 2008, 08:49.

You examplify the non-issue of surface syntax very well: both the Python and the Perl code translates into roughly equivalent abstract syntax, i.e. the programming language primitives as the compiler sees them, after parsing the text: GetHash, PrintString, Assign and so on.

Indeed; that's why I chose to learn Common Lisp, a multiparadigm language that allows you to program using whatever means is best suited for the problem, instead of fitting the problem to the language. And, if there is no abstraction already for your problem, you can readily invent your own using macros and the metaobject-protocol.

Without having to learn a new programming language and its surface syntax....

Please be aware that comment forms go stale after one hour.

@@ ruby
def a (b, c):
  b * c
end
@@

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