Re: Hello - and where to begin?

Gwenhwyfaer wrote:
> On 23/01/2008, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Jason Kemp wrote:
>>> Are there any other computer languages that arouse such philosophical
>>> discourse and soul searching?
> 
>> Scheme.
> 
> The whole Lisp family, in fact.
> 
> And Haskell as well, to an extent, as the most well-developed current
> embodiment of pure functional programming - it turns out that more and
> more of what we assume to be low level facilities to be abstracted
> away can be simulated by a purely functional machine. (And arrows are
> very reminiscent of stack operations.)
> 
> I remember talking to some professor in Manchester University, when I
> went there for an interview in 1991, about whether Forth could be
> treated as a functional language; I said yes, because of the ease with
> which functions can be composed, but he raised the question of
> laziness...
> 
> The thing that all of these beasts have in common is that they blur
> the distinction between compile time and runtime, in both phase and
> environment. Even if Haskell is still a bit stuck in batch-mode
> thinking, and hasn't quite realised that's what it's doing... but it's
> hard to see where else the combination of strict typing and lazy
> evaluation is going; the parts of a program that the type system can
> express is evaluated as early as possible (ie. at compile time), and
> the rest isn't evaluated until it absolutely has to be.

Well ... I've always thought there really were only three innovative 
languages -- Lisp, APL and Forth. I view Haskell, ML, Prolog, Erlang, 
and all the other functional languages as specialized dialects of Lisp.