What are you? Five? [Protip: The giveaway on that is the </sarc> tag.]
Playing with languages isn't the same thing as coding in them. I've coded in 370 Assembler, various micro processor Assemblers, all dialects of FORTRAN since FORTRAN IV, Algol, Pascal, Delphi, PL/I, APL, Prolog, C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, and most known idioms of Basic. FOR MONEY. Let me stress that: FOR MONEY. If you aint doing it for money, you're just a hobbyist. I don't have time for hobby languages.
And I'm not the least bit interested in lectures about "best practices" from pedants who don't know anything about my code.
The fact that you think fooling around with hobby languages makes you a "sophisticate" thinking about the "problem of problems" says more about you than it can ever say about anyone else. See how that ad hominem thing works?
Read Rudin, or Herstein or Berkoff and McClane, Spivak or one of the other great mathematical expositors if you want to vacation in pure abstraction, not stupid kiddie languages. Read Cohen's book on the Continuum Hypothesis.
Lisp? Seriously? Lisp. My gawd.
I did say it was about functional programming; are there better FP languages -- probably. (I don't know them as I haven't gotten around to learning FP; though I do know some of the semi-recent buzzwords, like closures, come from that branch.) Does that diminish the value of learning FP? No.
My point, which you missed, was that looking at different languages can be instructive in [and of] itself.
Read Rudin, or Herstein or Berkoff and McClane, Spivak or one of the other great mathematical expositors if you want to vacation in pure abstraction, not stupid kiddie languages. Read Cohen's book on the Continuum Hypothesis.
I have mixed feelings about pure math -- it is useful, most of the time, but the leap from the abstraction to the applicability is admittedly difficult for me at times. It's the area between the hearing it and "the light comes on", when you've only got it by the tips of your fingernails that I find most uncomfortable.
And I'm not the least bit interested in lectures about "best practices" from pedants who don't know anything about my code.
True; I know nothing about your code. I know only how you've presented yourself.
Playing with languages isn't the same thing as coding in them.
This I agree with -- which is why I said that it needed more than an "I know about" level of knowledge.
I've coded in 370 Assembler, various micro processor Assemblers, all dialects of FORTRAN since FORTRAN IV, Algol, Pascal, Delphi, PL/I, APL, Prolog, C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, and most known idioms of Basic. FOR MONEY. Let me stress that: FOR MONEY. If you aint doing it for money, you're just a hobbyist.
I've done paid work in PHP, Delphi, and C#. -- but here you're making a big mistake; just because I'm not getting paid for my work with Ada, which I'll admit is hobbyist in-nature, does not mean it is not helpful in my paid work. Indeed, consider writers -- virtually every one that talks about becoming a writer to those who ask give two pieces of instruction: read and write. (The reading lets you see how things are done, from grammar to story-construction; and the writing is exercising and applying those yourself.)
I don't have time for hobby languages.
I'm rather underemployed -- so I do.
But even so, even though I hated using C & C++ in school and was vocal about it (and its design deficiencies), I would not begrudge anyone who said "C++ has feature X" when the topic was X.
What are you? Five? [Protip: The giveaway on that is the tag.]
Perhaps I should have used a </deadpan> tag then?
I'm still a fairly young man.
Oh good grief. Not this ridiculous crap again. "The fact that I'm interested in kiddie languages and you dismiss them says everything about you ... "
Um, on this thread I've mentioned Prolog, Pascal, Delphi, C, C++, C# -- if those are kiddie languages why do you mention them in your "I got paid for them" rant? It seems more a disparaging term than that of 'hobbyist'.