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I’ve always been in the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis camp that your tools of expression influence and (sometimes) define your thoughts. A great example is the idea of matrices in math. Matrices don’t allow you to represent anything that a system of equations can’t. But it turns out that they are a very helpful tool and let you abstract over the problem space, much in the same way that higher order functions do. It’s exactly like Paul Graham says, you might think that Python is just allowing you to write executable pseudo-code, but the interaction isn’t so simple. I’ve programmed a lot of Python and when I first started out, I felt like it was very frictionless, like you said. An easy way to put down thoughts. But as I learned more about functional programming and type theory, I realized that Python is inadequate and operates a top low level. i.e it feels like there’s so much friction there. I have used a variety of languages professionally (Scala, Haskell, OCaml, Racket, C, and Python mostly) and they all fall short (some more than others) on what I feel like I should be able to express. But if I had to chose, I would probably say OCaml or Racket come the closest to my thoughts, depending on the problem. Anyway, my point is that it’s not obvious how your tools affect the level and abstraction of your thoughts. It’s almost always a bi-directional relationship, and therefore, choosing (or making) the right tool and method of abstraction is very important. See Beating the Averages[1]. PG talks about the a hypothetical language called Blub. Blub isn’t the best, but it’s not the worst either. If there was a platonic form of Blub, it would most definitely be Python. [1]http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html |
Also is it Racket specifically that makes it a good contender or is it the fact that it is a Lisp that makes it a good contender? Would any other Lisp like Scheme or Clojure or Common Lisp be equally good?