🚀 go-pugleaf

David Collier (dcollier@cix.compulink.co.uk) wrote:
: Think of computer languages like human languages. Every time you learn a 
: new one, you learn a new way to say things, and a few new neat concepts, 
: and ways to understand. But in the end, expressing the ideas in your head 
: is  pretty similar in most of them. And it you are dumb and tongue-tied 
: in one, you wont be better in another.

The reason that most high level imperative languages are the same is that
they are based on the same idea of the Von Neauman Architecture. i.e. the
concept of cpu, main memory, secondary storage, etc.  In other words you
have a memory matrix in which to store variables and instructions and you
need to fetch these things from memory to work on them, then when your done
you store them back into main memory for use later.  Other languages that are
declarative are totally different in the way they look at the architecture.
Another paradigm is object oriented programming which takes into 
consideration the data that is to be manipulated rather than the 
procedures and functions that manipulate them.  In object oriented 
languages we try to establish objects that work and return objects that 
we can let other objects use.  The objects are the data types.  We don't 
care how a data type handles the processing just as long as it does it.  
This ensures that we can reuse the object in future programs.  AN example 
would be an object called string.  We pass a string to it say: "Hello 
World" and then pass a command like "printstr".  The string data type 
itself says ok, someone gave me a string that is my type, and now they 
are telling me to print this string, let me look and see if I have a way 
to do that in my bag of tricks.  It looks and sure enough finds the 
necessary code to do it.  This links the data types with the operations 
that can be performed on them.  Hopefully by doing this, we can eliminate 
the need to re-write code that does the same thing over and over.  But, who's
to say that the original writer of the object and its methods did it the 
correct way?