From: Christian Szegedy (szegedy@or.uni-bonn.de)
Date: Mon Dec 23 2002 - 05:56:57 MST
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> > Does anyone know about the maximum number of languages that can be learnt?
> I think it is in the vicinity of 5-6 (with some degree of fluency).
I personally know a professor who speaks 12 languages fluently
("fluently" also means: without accent). Of course, such
prodigies are uncommon, but exist.
> The principles behind most of these languages with the exception of
> LISP and SMALLTALK are pretty much the same so relearning a new
> vocabulary isn't too difficult.
Hmmm, you must have missed Haskell,(O)(ca)ML,Haskell,clean,mercury,
prolog,Dylan,Erlang,Q or J.
For me, they are much more different from C than smalltalk
or lisp.
They are mostly similar in that regard, that they are mainly
declarative, i.e. you declare the specification of the functions
abstracly, *not* the way *how* they should be computed.
That is, the programs are precise mathematical specifications,
instead of state-transformers as in the imperative languages.
There is a nice comparison of the syntax of programming languages on
http://merd.net/pixel/language-study/syntax-across-languages.html
However, it is only a syntactical comparision, it does not show
the principal differences.
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