🚀 go-pugleaf

This was intended as a personal reply. However my mail came back with
"host unknown". Since I think that its content is of enough of general
interest I post it to the net instead.

In article <1992@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> garry%cadif-oak@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu writes:
>In a recent article sommar@enea.UUCP (Erland Sommarskog) wrote:
>>                       ... What Wirth and no one else probably didn't
>>realize is that the language you learn first is the one you know best and
>>the one you prefer...
>
>You gotta be kidding!!!   PDP-11 assembler?  TRS-80 Basic??
>
>For me it was the language I learned 4th that I like best (and 
>unfortunately no longer have a compiler for) - dear old Simula. Learning
>Fortran as #1 just allowed me to appreciate the beauty of the world
>better when I later encountered structured languages.

No, I am not kidding. I think my assertion holds for many people. There are
those who were raised on assembler who still really can't see why they should
program in a high-level language. And I would claim that the statement "real
programmers can write Fortran in any language" has this background too.
  Of course not everyone is like this. Some people may accept one or two
changes of paradigm before they stiffen into something. Some are even more
open for new influences. And specially; they are not satisfied with what
they have right now, they want better things. 
  Apparently you are of the latter kind which enlightens me. I met Simula
as my 5th language or so and it is still my favourite, although I have more 
or less given up hope to work with it. Anyway, Ada is not that bad either.

By the way, I read your article about VMS vs. Unix in mod.computers.vax.
It was very amusing and interesting. 

Erland