Thinking by analogy

I have the impression that many people believe most of the friction, when moving from one programming language to another, arises from differences in the syntax of the languages. I'm not so sure. True, it took me a little while to grok UserTalk's @ and ^ operators, to figure out that assigning to l[0] builds the list, and to realize that UserTalk lists and tables must be declared as such. But that's not where I lost the most time. What really slowed me down was not knowing how higher level idioms — visualizing the contents of a table, sorting the table — mapped into UserTalk. [ Full story at BYTE.com... ]


Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/03/18.html#a147