Re: Hello - and where to begin?

"M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <[email protected]> said:
> 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.

What you take as baseline determines what is innovative.

FORTRAN was, without a doubt, innovative, when it came out.

ALGOL was certainly innovative.  PASCAL was arguably innovative, in that it 
provided a real data structuring facility, combined with strong typing, AND 
it was designed to be compiled and linked in ONE PASS.

I would argue that C was not particularly innovative: almost everything it 
provided was already available in other languages.  (The exception, the 
glorification of pointer arithmetic, is a misfeature, in my opinion.)