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- August 2021When people say that in their experience all programming languages
- are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about
- languages but about the kind of programming they've done.99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library
- functions. All popular languages are equally good at this. So one
- can easily spend one's whole career operating in the intersection
- of popular programming languages.But the other .5% of programming is disproportionately interesting.
- If you want to learn what it consists of, the weirdness of weird
- languages is a good clue to follow.Weird languages aren't weird by accident. Not the good ones, at
- least. The weirdness of the good ones usually implies the existence
- of some form of programming that's not just the usual gluing together
- of library calls.A concrete example: Lisp macros. Lisp macros seem weird even to
- many Lisp programmers. They're not only not in the intersection of
- popular languages, but by their nature would be hard to implement
- properly in a language without turning it into a dialect of
- Lisp. And macros are definitely evidence of techniques that go
- beyond glue programming. For example, solving problems by first
- writing a language for problems of that type, and then writing
- your specific application in it. Nor is this all you can do with
- macros; it's just one region in a space of program-manipulating
- techniques that even now is far from fully explored.So if you want to expand your concept of what programming can be,
- one way to do it is by learning weird languages. Pick a language
- that most programmers consider weird but whose median user is smart,
- and then focus on the differences between this language and the
- intersection of popular languages. What can you say in this language
- that would be impossibly inconvenient to say in others? In the
- process of learning how to say things you couldn't previously say,
- you'll probably be learning how to think things you couldn't
- previously think.
- Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Daniel Gackle, Amjad
- Masad, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
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