Lee Copeland, managing technical editor of Better Software magazine, recently wrote of the Whorfian Hypothesis, which, according to Wikipedia.org, "argues that the nature of a particular language influences the habitual thought of its speakers." As early as 1957, Kenneth Iverson, inventor of APL, prefaced his presentation of that interesting language with the phrase "Language is a tool of thought." His goal was to efficiently process large arrays of data in multiple dimensions, so APL sports numerous operators, all very succinct and mutually orthogonal. When it's time to cut code, the programming language we're using tends to govern our thoughts. A C programmer will conjure up appropriate functions; a Java programmer will see nothing but objects; a developer using Haskell will traffic in lists and higher-order functions.
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