TITLE: Agglutination and Crystallization
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 07, 2012 11:17 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Alan Kay talks about programming languages quite a bit in
<A HREF="http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susan/475/AlanKay.html">
   this wide-ranging interview</A>.
(Aren't all interviews with Kay wide-ranging?)  I liked
this fuzzy bifurcation of the language world:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
... a lot of them are either the agglutination of features
or ... a crystallization of style.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

My initial reaction was that I'm a crystallization-of-style
guy.  I have always had a deep fondness for style languages,
with Smalltalk at the head of the list and Joy and Scheme
not far behind.

But I'm not a purist when it comes to
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies">
   neat and scruffy</A>.
As an undergrad, I really liked programming in PL/I.  Java
never bothered me as much as it bothered some of my purist
friends, and I admit unashamedly that I enjoy programming
in it.

These days, I like Ruby as much as I like any language.  It
is a language that lies in the fuzz between Kay's categories.
It has an "everything is an object" ethos but, man alive,
is it an amalgamation of syntactic and semantic desiderata.

I attribute linguistic split personality to this: I prefer
languages with a "real center", but I don't mind imposing
a stylistic filter on an agglutinated language.  PL/I always
felt comfortable because I programmed with a pure structured
programming vibe.  When I program in Java or Ruby now,
somewhere in the center of my mind is a Smalltalk programmer
seeing the language through a Smalltalk lens.  I have to
make a few pragmatic concessions to the realities of my tool,
and everything seems to work out fine.

This semester, I have been teaching with Java.  Next semester,
I will be teaching with Scheme.  I guess I can turn off the
filter.
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