Comments on: Why Your Programming Language Is “Too Academic”

By: Chris Wong

Chris Wong — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 03:05:00 +0000

Yes, OCaml is an excellent language just to get your feet wet. Has anyone written a beginner-level OCaml tutorial yet?

By: Graeme Defty

Graeme Defty — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:10:11 +0000

I was interested that the idea of “too academic” seemed hard to pin down. Intuitively I feel I know what it means (to me anyway) but would also have a tough time describing it. “too wierd” doesn’t really help. “too hard” is part of it, but it feels more like a symptom than a cause. “too powerful” certainly doesn’t do it.

Is it just that the language is too far in language-space from what you are familiar with? That there are too many new paradigms involved for comfort? That may be why the ability to “write COBOL” in your new language is such a soother. It lets you play in the language and learn the new idioms as you do so.

I still don’t have a decent replacement for “too academic” though :-(

One other thought (which could help prove or disprove the above) is that it would be interesting to hear from someone who learned programming with a functional language about their experiences moving to Java for the first time (“What do you mean, I have to tell it what to do?!”) I suspect that the dificulty would be vastly reduced because that form of imperative instruction is how we tend to deal with each other. Instructions stating how to make a cup of tea are much more likely to look like C than Haskell (well, maybe not C, but you get the point ;-) )

By: Hydrocon Session Log, 1241655767 « I Built His Cage

Hydrocon Session Log, 1241655767 « I Built His Cage — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:23:39 +0000

[...] mean, what the hell? We started out functional programming by learning Scheme, another “academic” language, and I think that gave me a solid idea of what ideas like closures and currying are about. We [...]

By: Helltime for April 20 « I Built His Cage

Helltime for April 20 « I Built His Cage — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 02:43:42 +0000

[...] at Enfranchised Mind, Robert Fischer refreshingly explains why languages get categorized as merely for the wizards of academia. First, I found it ironic that Robert credits Java’s popularity, somewhat backhandedly, to [...]

By: Robert Fischer

Robert Fischer — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:48:47 +0000

@Tracy

In saying we should be sensitive to the limits of gradual adoption, I’m talking about building hand-holding into language infrastructure based on the assumption that someone knows a mainstream language but is learning yours. Useful compiler/runtime error messages, an accessible API, and, yes, even some language features to mimic dominant paradigms[1] are all ways to do that.

[1] See Brian’s OCaml example above — I couldn’t remember the for loop syntax when I wrote my comment.