Economy Size Geek

My observations about languages:
1) Spend a little time evaluating and toss quickly those that you don’t like
2) Toy problems are designed to make a language look good or to point out its strongest features
3) Fiddling with your own toy problems highlights issues of a language relevant to your use of it
4) Until you implement a real problem you can’t understand the language
5) Until you hit the limits of applicability you aren’t proficient in a language
6) A language will subliminimally and fundamentally alter your perception of a problem
7) Don’t believe the hype
8) The proper or improper design of data structures can make a problem range from trivial to unsolvable; ease of expressing and redesigning data structures is essential to solving real problems

This is actually from a larger narrative about why someone chose to switch to Erlang.Why I chose erlang (very, very long story) (I’ve been looking at Erlang recently for a variety of reasons - which if I ever get any where I’ll post about)

Even though this is about Erlang - the general ideas above seem appropriate to discuss when you eval any new language. I guess number #2 was the one that really stood out since I’ve met so many people have “played with” Rails. It almost seems literal - I mean they watched the screen cast - downloaded it - made a screen and that was it….