or the worst.
As Larry Wall said: "The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil."[1]
[1]: http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html
PS. I always wanted to quote this :-)
13 karma · joined December 16, 2012
As Larry Wall said: "The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil."[1]
[1]: http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html
PS. I always wanted to quote this :-)
As a note: IIRC, SWI-Prolog got hash tables in their 7th release, so some fundamental data structure can be added to a language when it's seen as not needed by the language developers.
This reminds me of Smalltalk environment like Pharo. I recently realised that there were so much things in common between Lisp and Smalltalk environments (by Lisp environments I mean what we have today like SLIME+Emacs or LightTable). I also think that LightTable has a huge potential for being a successor of Lisp machines and _really_ integrated development environments.
In the other hand, English and lots of other languages (including my native language Turkish) are synthetic languages, so they have affixes, and they do not adapt well to logographic writing systems (class of Chinese characters) in my opinion (I am not an expert on linguistics). My reasoning is not the cognitive overhead that's caused by memorizing tons of characters, but overhead of encoding/decoding the affixes into that type of writing system.
Japanese is an interesting example in this case, it is a synthetic language and has conjugation etc. so Japanese people use Kanji (Chinese characters as used by Japanese) to write word root and Hiragana to write conjugation, function words, spelling etc.