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Bugmaster comments on What is the best programming language? - Less Wrong
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Learn assembly, C, and Scheme, in that order.
Start by learning assembly for some small, manageable microcontroller, like PIC16 (if they still sell those) or a low-end Atmel, preferably one that you could wire up yourself. Prove to yourself that you can make LEDs light up by writing bits to ports. This will give you a good understanding of what computers actually do behind the scenes.
Follow that up with C, for your desktop machine. Implement some common data structures like linked lists and binary trees (you could do it in assembly as well, but it'd be too annoying). Get a good feeling for pointers, memory allocation, and recursion. Learn what clean syntax feels like.
Finally, learn Scheme, which is a language of pure abstraction completely divorced from any hardware, operating system, or syntax (ok, this isn't 100% true, but it's close). Understand how you can manipulate very simple building looks to build powerful expressions, and how code can be used to generate other code and pass it around. Implement an object-oriented "meta-language" in Scheme.
At this point, you'll be well equipped to learn any other language you want in a manner of days. You will probably never use assembly, C, or Scheme ever again, but which would you rather have -- a single tool, or a factory inside your mind that lets you create tools at will ?
Oh, and stay as far away from C++ as you possibly can, it's pure poison.
I recommend outright reversal of the above process. If you absolutely must learn assembly language, do it once you can already program. The same applies to other excessively low level languages with a lot of emphasis on memory management rather than semantic expression.
I actually started with Basic, then went to Perl, then Python (which I didn't grok all that much at the time), and finally Forth, which is probably lower level than C in some respects but was somehow easier for me to stick with. I tried picking up C and couldn't get past Hello World. With Forth (specifically the RetroForth project -- which was a bit less smooth at the time) I built my own linked lists, dictionaries, string splitters, and stuff like that, using concatenation that maps more or less directly to machine code. Now when I look back at these other languages I see real stuff going on instead of magic. Maybe this is the equivalent of practicing fencing with a weighted sword.
This still misses a few ares. You would not be completely ready to learn OCaml (or Haskell) with sophisticated type inference system. You would probably not be ready to learn Erlang (unless you used something like Termite if your Scheme turned out to be Gambit). If you picked an R5RS Scheme, you would probably miss some parts of the power of macros. You would miss APL/J array processing. You would probably (unless you pay attention to using some Scheme object system) miss SmallTalk object orientation and also multiple dispatch-capable object oriented programming (which is not SmallTalk, but, say Common Lisp Object System).
As for calling C syntax clean... Well...
Anyway, for long-term learning you need to ask what concepts to learn - you will most probably have a choice of languages (but no one specific languages will include all).
All true, but you should be able to pick those up easily enough if you have internalized the other concepts. For example, type inference is much easier to understand when you realize that, underneath it all, there's no such thing as a "type" anyway, just pointers pointing to memory blocks of various sizes; and that, on the other hand, you could construct whatever notion of a "type" that you want, by using functional programming.
I have to admit, though, that I was never a big fan of macros, in any language.
I meant, as compared to raw assembly.
That was kind of my point: instead of learning a specific set of concepts, learn just enough of the right ones, so that adding new concepts becomes easy.
Well, it looks that either you have some minimal experience with abstract algebra or you will need to learn some of it while working with complex type systems.
Learning new powerful abstraction to the level of being able to exploit it for complex tasks is a matter of a few days of full-time learning/thinking/tinkering per se, so learning new languages will still not be trivial. And you have to spend a few weeks collecting minimal best practices.
Given that only macro-assembler and Lisp-like languages even had complex enough macros to matter until recently...
Well, from my experience I can say that implementing a Lisp-macros-like system for Pascal did help me simply to cope with some project. Some say that macros are just for fixing deficiencies of the language; while it is partially true, macros are useful because you will never have a language precisely fit for your task at hand in a large project.
But on the same distance from hardware, there is also Pascal. I remember being able to read Pascal without knowing much of it, and it is still not verbose enough to be annoying to some people. While learning C, it is a nice idea to write down every way to write a hard-to-read code buried in the syntax that you come up with. After a while, it will make a useful checklist when cleaning up sloppy code.
The main problem is that unless you have learned some concept you don't really know whether you need to try to apply it. You give a nice set of starter concepts, of course, but I found it useful to show that there are very numerous concepts not mentioned - and it is a good idea to be aware of them.
A piece of advice not to take seriously is to look at http://www.falconpl.org/index.ftd?page_id=facts . Afterwards, one could find where all the mentioned concepts are implemented sanely and learn those languages...
Or both !
It depends on what you mean by "trivial". Learning a programming language to the point where you can effectively employ it to solve a complex real-world problem will never be easy, for the same reason that learning a human language to the point where you can converse in it will never be easy. There are always a bunch of library APIs (or dictionary words), edge cases, and best practices (or colloquialisms) to memorize. But understanding the basics of the language does not have to be hard.
Technically, this is a language deficiency in and of itself. I rarely find myself wishing I had more macros in Python, or even C#. I do wish there were macros in Java, but that's because they still haven't implemented closures correctly.
I dislike Pascal because I find its pointer syntax to be needlessly obscure. That said, I haven't used Pascal for like 15 years, so my knowledge could be hopelessly outdated.
Sure, but you've got to draw the line somewhere; after all, there are as many concepts as there are language designers ! Many of them can be rolled into more general concepts (f.ex., all kinds of different type systems can be rolled into the "type system" category). Others aren't even concepts at all, but simply useful tools, such as regular expressions or file I/O. You can't learn everything at once, so you might as well start with the big ideas, and go from there.
All this is simple to look up - programming is not fluent speech, it is writing. The problem is that similar words have radically different combinations of meanings. And also, sometimes there are totally new concepts in the language. You see it better after you try learning a language where concepts do match your expectations.
Well, I have written significant amount of code in Python and I did have to use workarounds that would be cleaner as macros... If you consider your language a good fit to your task at any time, you are likely just not asking for the best. It can be mitigated if your requirements are understandable.
It is still the same. But C syntax is plainy malicious even in assignments, so why care about pointers. Somehow, Google managed to create a clean C-derived syntax in Go by streamlining a lot of rules.
But it is also clear that you should always know that you are not learning some magical set of all basic concepts, just the concepts that are simpliest to learn in the beginning.
Have you ever tried learning a foreign language ? Maybe it was easy for you -- I know people who seem to have a natural aptitude for it -- but for me, it was basically a long painful slog through dictionary-land. Yes, from a strictly algorithmic standpoint, you could look up every word you intend to read or write; but this works very poorly for most humans.
I think your demands might be a bit too strict. I am perfectly ok with using a language that is a good, though not 100% perfect, fit for my task. Sometimes, I would even settle for an inferior language, if doing so grants me access to more powerful libraries that free me from extra work. Sure, I could "ask for the best", but I have other goals to accomplish.
How so ? Perhaps you were thinking of C++, which is indeed malicious ?
I agree with you that there's no magical silver bullet set of concepts, but I also believe that some concepts are vastly more important than others, regardless of how easy they are to learn. For example, the basic concept you internalize when learning assembly is that (roughly speaking) the computer isn't a magical genie with arbitrary rules -- instead, it's a bag of circuits that moves electrons around. This idea seems trivial when written down, but internalizing it is key to becoming a successful programmer. It also leads naturally to understanding pointers, on which the vast majority of other languages -- yes, even Scheme -- are built. I doubt that you can properly understand things like type inference without first understanding bits and pointers.
English, French (I usually forget the latter and recover it when I have any proximate use for it). My native language is Russian. It is a big relief when learning French that most words have the same translations in many contexts. This multi-translation problem is way more annoying than simply looking up words.
This actually confirms my point. You will have to choose inferior language from time to time, and its lack of tools of adapting language to your task is either local incompetence of language authors or lack of resources for development of language or lnaguage community arrogance.
"i+= i++ + ++i;" can be reliably compiled but not predicted. There are many actual everyday examples like "if(a=b);".
Of course, it is not even close to C++, which takes malicious semantics a few levels up.
Any command-line programming environment will make you internalize that computer has some rules and that it does what you order - literally.
x86 assembly is quite arbitrary anyway. Maybe LLVM assembly (which is closer to "pointer machine" than to "random access machine) would be nicer. After all, high-level languages use specially wrapped pointers even in implementation.
You cannot properly understand some performance implications, maybe. But the actual input-output correspondence can be grokked anyway. Of course, only higher-order functions have a strict proof that they can be understood without proper understanding of imperative semantics.
It's possible that you are much better at automatically memorizing words than I am.
Wait... what ? Are you saying that, when I have some practical task to finish, the best solution is to pick the most elegant language, disregarding all other options -- and that not doing so makes me arrogant ? I am pretty sure this isn't right. For example, my current project involves some Bluetooth communication and data visualization on Windows machines. There are libraries for Java and C# that fulfill all my Bluetooth and graphical needs; the Python library is close, but not as good. Are you saying that, instead of C#, I should just pick Scheme or Haskell or something, and implement my own Bluetooth stack and drawing APIs ? I am pretty sure that's not what you meant...
Ok that's a good point; I forgot about those pre-/post-increments, because I avoid them myself. They're pretty terrible.
On the other hand, the regular assignment operator does make sense; the rules that let you say "if(a=b)" also let you say "a=b=c". The result of an assignment operator is the RHS. I don't see this as a bad thing, though it might've been better to use "eq" or some other token instead of the comparison operator "==".
True, and that's a good lesson too, but programming in assembly lets you get close (though not too uncomfortably so) to the actual hardware. This allows you to internalize the idea that at least some of these rules are not arbitrary. Instead, they stem from the fact that, ultimately, your computer is an electron-pushing device which is operating under real-world constraints. This is important, because arbitrary rules are something you have to memorize, whereas physical constraints are something you can understand.
You are right about x86 assembly, though, which is why I mentioned "a small microcontroller" in my original post. Their assemblies tend to make more sense.
You are right, though this depends on which problem you're solving. If you approach the programming language completely in abstract, then yes, you can understand things like input-output correspondence from the strictly algebraic point of view. What you won't understand, though (at least, not as readily), is why all these language features were created in the first place, and which problems they are designed to solve. But if you never intend to write practical programs that perform applied tasks, maybe that's ok.
Or simply annoyed by different things.
Sorry for unclear phrase. I mean that language's lack of tools is language's arrogance.
"a=b=c;" vs "a=c; b=c;" is not much; the former syntax simplifies injection of vulnerabilities (intentionally or incidentally).
I have written in C for these microcontrollers - physical constraints visibly leak into the language, so if you are learning C anyway, you could delay learning assembly.
If you learn just Scheme and OCaml you still can understand what type system and type inference gives you.
You can appreciate steam engine without knowing nuclear physics, after all.