Re:Ask HN: How to choose the right language
by silentbicycle on Saturday August 15, 2009 @02:55PM
(#765046)
It's easy to find blog posts to talk yourself out of getting started with any language. None of them are perfect! Lisp has that "stupid parenthetical syntax" [1], Python has the whitespace thing, Lua indexes from 1, Javascript ...
I started tinkering with Prolog as a summer project, and as a side effect, Erlang makes sooo much more sense now. (Erlang was originally implemented in Prolog, and inherited a lot of its syntax & style.) I picked it deliberately because it's quite far from everything I know, and Peter Norvig said a lot of interesting things about it in PAIP. Chatter on the web gives the impression that it's just some weird dead AI language, but I've found it really inspiring. I'm glad I didn't let that discourage me. Even if the only benefit I get from it is the insight into Erlang's design, being able to read Sterling & Shapiro's _The Art of Prolog_* , and finally getting how unification/pattern matching and type inference work, it was time well spent.
* Which is awe-inspiring. I would recommend it regardless of whether you care about Prolog, much like Norvig's PAIP is worth reading even if you don't care about Common Lisp.
I started tinkering with Prolog as a summer project, and as a side effect, Erlang makes sooo much more sense now. (Erlang was originally implemented in Prolog, and inherited a lot of its syntax & style.) I picked it deliberately because it's quite far from everything I know, and Peter Norvig said a lot of interesting things about it in PAIP. Chatter on the web gives the impression that it's just some weird dead AI language, but I've found it really inspiring. I'm glad I didn't let that discourage me. Even if the only benefit I get from it is the insight into Erlang's design, being able to read Sterling & Shapiro's _The Art of Prolog_* , and finally getting how unification/pattern matching and type inference work, it was time well spent.
* Which is awe-inspiring. I would recommend it regardless of whether you care about Prolog, much like Norvig's PAIP is worth reading even if you don't care about Common Lisp.
[1]: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Talks/SwineBeforePe...