APL. Lisp. VBA. These are all programming languages. Everyone offers various modules, syntaxes and ideas. One thing is interesting. The more advanced a programming languages is that you’ve used, the more you wish their features in other languages. Lisp is certainly the most famous example with dynamic typing, garbage collection and macros.
I do really enjoy high level programming. I adapt quite easily to many features of various programming languages. Beginning with garbage collection to pattern matching and if I return after a long time from Python and Haskell to C or C++ I really miss some features.
A very simple example.
#define MAX_VAL 100
int values[MAX_VAL] = {1, 9, 2, ...};
int i;
int sum = 0;
for(i = 0; i < MAX_VAL; i++)
sum += values[i]
printf("Sum is %i\n", sum);
vs.
values = [1, 9, 2, ...]
print "Sum is", sum(values)
The second solution avoids even side-effects.
However, I understand some things about esr’s attitude better. He wrote:
I suggest you should use Python, to avoid C programming on jobs that don’t require C’s machine efficiency.