I’m surprised Racket hasn’t come up on this thread yet. It was the first LISP I learned and was incredibly rewarding for my day job as a developer. I only touched its surface, but would love the opportunity to dive deeper into some of its abilities to create domain specific languages for specialized tasks.

On Wed, Dec 25, 2019 at 2:13 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe this will be the year I finally learn Rust.  Like Larry if I am feeling like using a compiled language, I reach for Go or C (probably in that order these days), and my day job is mostly Python, which once you get over the syntactic whitespace, really is pretty much just executable pseudocode, which turns out to be rather nice.

FORTH is fun and everyone should learn enough of it to get the feel of a stack-based language.  You can have most of the fun with a proper HP calculator (I never owned a better calculator than the 28S).  Not sure how relevant FORTH is anymore, but it makes a nice palate-cleanser.  Of course if you turn the stack on its side you have a list, and writing in LISP dialects is also fun.

This also may be the year I dust off and get good at IBM 370 assembler.  I've got a vanilla VM/370r6 and one with the SixPack and DIAG58 and all the bells and whistles (including a screen editor not a million miles from good old XEDIT) running under Hercules.  So it seems like taking a crack at getting v7 for the 370 going is something I really should do.  And I talked to someone--don't remember who without searching my email archives--about bootstrapping from v7 to whatever the latest Research Unix we can find is.  That'd be cool too.


Adam

On Wed, Dec 25, 2019 at 10:31 AM Tomasz Rola <rtomek@ceti.pl> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 23, 2019 at 06:27:48PM -0500, Nemo Nusquam wrote:
> A recent thread makes me wonder which languages would people like to
> learn?  (I confess to trying, as Dave does, but time prevents
> anything more that learing syntax and writing toy programmes.  One
> must write something substantial -- not synonomous with large -- to
> really learn a language.)
>
> Erlang, Smalltalk, Prolog, Haskell, and Scheme come to mind...

I will swim upstream and say: if I had more free time, I would
probably want to finish reading "The AWK Programming Language" by Aho,
Kernighan snd Weinberger. The language is quite limited (as I have
written in another email of mine) but I think it is grossly
underappreciated and quite a few things can be squeezed out from it.

After that, I could find myself some decent Forth introduction and
finish reading that one, too.

But if you have not had experience with Scheme yet, try it out. LISPs
in general are worth learning, IMHO. And much more practical than what
a popular opinion says.

--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com             **
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