As Brian Hayes says in his article “Semicolon wars”, there a re a lot of programming languages and there is not a definitive one. Each programmer will have his/her own favorite language between thousands and thousands of languages. And Brayan says that even though there are a lot of languages, there is not any “definitive language” created yet, and if any company is trying to make the better one, we must cooperate to make so. And I think that it is completely true. We can help giving some feedback about fixes that must have to perform, or by the other way advices of what to change or what to improve or delete.

It’s amazing how many languages in little time were created, and with great differences between some of them, the article gives the example that between C and Lisp, the differences are greater than between any pair of human language. And if you think, the human languages are now pretty difficult, humans have invented thousands of computer languages, and for sure will create more and more, and they are focused on create a definitive one.

About the comments of Edsger W. Dijktra said about different languages, I am against him. He criticizes, in a very offensive way, in his book “How do we tell truths that might hurt”, some languages as COBOL, APL, BASIC and others. We don’t have to discuss if that language is better that others, or this language is trash.  Language were not invented to judge them. We have to work with them to solve problems, and probably improve our devices.

About Lisp, I´m interested on learn and try to solve different kind of problems in that language. Learning a new language will not kill me and maybe at the end of the course I’ll change my main programming language. Who knows?

Reference

Hayes, B. (2006). The semicolon wars. American Scientists