

Programming languages shape the way their users think - gits1225
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/536356/toolkits-for-the-mind/?

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AnimalMuppet
I kind of checked out on this article once it lumped Go in the same category
as OCaml. I mean, they're both less kludgy tools than PHP, but... they're
still so far different in approach and philosophy and style and _everything_
that I had a hard time taking the article seriously after that.

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M8
Imagining OCAML without generics is fun though :). Also he did get that
dynamic is only good for prototyping.

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jack9
At what point do you recognize that the model you want to be best is not the
best? PHP dominates the landscape because it's the best tool for a large
portion of developers (ostensibly newbies). For being concerned and critical
about, computer scientists seem to ignore the data that already exists.

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kedean
The tool many people use isn't always the best one. Most of the world runs on
coal for power, but that doesn't mean it's a good choice, it's just the easy
one. PHP is not a good choice for anyone, it's the easy one. The only
arguments in favor of it are that it is easy to learn (I would say that it is
too easy to learn), and that its easy to get set up with. Being easy to set up
doesn't make it good, it just reflects on the state of shared hosting as of
~10 year ago when PHP became the amateur webdev standard.

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dwarman
... and then out of those specific tools emerges a meta-cognition of language
as an abstract, now retargetable even to the point of easily generating new
languages where needed, and also of becoming really fast picking up previously
unexplored languages for new problems.

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Confusion
... which is why being multilingual gives you a broader perspective and a
wider variety of cognitive tools to solve problems.

