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by softbuilder 2844 days ago
'Elegant' is probably not a word I would choose, although it may apply at times. Erlang was the first place I saw pattern matching and is also how I came to actually understand list comprehensions, although I'd seen them elsewhere. There were other little things. And I liked the syntax! I don't think it was any one thing though. It was more the way things worked together, and worked much differently than other languages I had worked with. At that point I had been a programmer for 10 years and felt kind of jaded. Everything seemed fundamentally the same. I was even surprised now not-weird Lisp was when I finally got around to it. It seemed like once you get to a certain place with programming you think you basically have it all worked out and everything becomes implementations details. And then something comes along and shakes that understanding. It's that shake that I was grateful for. It was a personal experience. Others have probably had that with Haskell, etc.. I hope everyone gets to have that now and then.
1 comments

Thanks!