an oop question
Julieta Shem
jshem at yaxenu.org
Wed Nov 2 20:45:46 EDT 2022
ram at zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:
> Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> writes:
>>I don't see any overlap between these at the conceptual level.
>
> It might come from early LISP dialects. In early LISPs, the
> only basic means to combine data into a larger assembly of
> data was the dotted pair and NULL (as an end marker). So,
> whenever you wanted to create a data structure, you would
> wonder how to build it from dotted pairs and NULLs.
>
> You also had lists, of course, but these were themselves build
> from dotted pairs and NULLs, as I explained in a recent post.
>
> (I wrote "early LISP", because I don't know much about modern
> "Lisp" dialects.)
>
> And when people learn a new (programming) language, until they
> become more confident in it, they start to emulate their
> previous language(s) in it. Writing FORTRAN in Pascal, and
> so on. So when you know Clojure and then come to Python, you
> might wonder how to do Clojure things in Python. (Clojure
> is a kind of Lisp.)
And that's very interesting. It's a nice evidence of that conjecture
that the languages we use affect the way we see things. Noam Chomsky
has been saying that the primary function of language is to be a tool of
thought rather than communication; communication is definitely important
and real, but not the primary reason why language was developed.
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