TITLE: How Do We Choose The Programming Languages We Love?
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 12, 2018  4:03 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 In
<A HREF="http://www.albersfoundation.org/artists/selected-writings/anni-albers/#tab4">
   Material as Metaphor</A>,
 the artist Anni Albers talks about how she came to choose
 media in which she worked:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 How do we choose our specific material, our means of
 communication?  "Accidentally".  Something speaks to
 us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it
 catches us and asks us to be formed.  We are finding
 our language, and as we go along we learn to obey
 their rules and their limits.  We have to obey, and
 adjust to those demands.  Ideas flow from it to us
 and though we feel to be the creator we are involved
 in a dialogue with our medium.  The more subtly we
 are tuned to our medium, the more inventive our
 actions will become.  Not listening to it ends in
 failure.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 This expresses much the way I feel about different programming
 languages and styles.  I can like them all, and sometimes do!
 I go through phases when one style speaks to me more than
 another, or when one language seems to be in sync with how I
 am thinking.  When that happens, I find myself wanting to
 learn its rules, to conform so that I can reach a point where
 I feel creative enough to solve interesting problems in the
 language.

 If I find myself not liking a language, it's usually because
 I'm not listening to it; I'm fighting back.  When I first
 tried to learn Haskell, I refused to bend to its style of
 functional programming.  I had worked hard to grok FP in
 Scheme, and I was so proud of my hard-won understanding that
 I wanted to impose it on the new language.  Eventually, I
 retreated for a while, returned more humbly, and finally
 came to appreciate Haskell, if not master it deeply.

 My experience with Smalltalk went differently.
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-09.html#e2011-09-08T20_19_25.htm">
   One summer</A>
 I listened to what it was telling me, slowly and patiently,
 throwing code away and starting over several times on an
 application I was trying to build.  This didn't feel like a
 struggle so much as a several-month tutoring session.  By
 the end, I felt ideas flowing through me.  I think that's
 the kind of dialogue Albers is referring to.

 If I want to master a new programming language, I have to
 be willing to obey its limits and to learn how to use its
 strengths as leverage.  This can be a conscious choice.
 It's frustrating when that doesn't seem to be enough.

 I wish I could always will myself into the right frame of
 mind to learn a new way of thinking.  Albers reminds us that
 often a language speaks to us first.  Sometimes, I just have
 to walk away and wait until the time is right.
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