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Johney Thomas

Get your feel of IT.

I am working on a new initiative right now and am looking at programming and languages in a different way from what I am used to — not as an end user of programs, but as someone deploying programs for use. Probably the most authoritative code I can write goes like this:

10 REM ‘Hello World by Nagaraj’

20 PRINT “Hello, World!”

30 END

If you can’t suddenly remember what language it is, here’s a clue: the progressive schools taught this in the late eighties. [GW BASIC on a BBC Micro.]

Anyway, as I was trying to quickly learn what programming languages are around and what they are used for and their particular idiosyncrasies, I came across an interesting and funny language comparator ( http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~mvanier/hacking/rants/cars.html) by Mike Vanier, a computer scientist and computational neuroscientist at Caltech.

He compares different languages as though they were cars.

If you are curious, I thought the best one was: “Lisp looks like a car, but with enough tweaking you can turn it into a pretty effective airplane or submarine.”

Update: A representative of one of the companies named in last week’s piece called to say that I was wrong, but couldn’t quite explain what was wrong as we walked through the Web site together.

I am surprised and heartened — I thought the big companies did not follow this space; and that there was dialogue.

N. Nagaraj

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