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Subject: Re: Any idea's on how long it takes to learn C++, then create a chessmonster

Author: Gareth McCaughan

Date: 17:40:12 12/11/01

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On December 11, 2001 at 18:21:11, Dann Corbit wrote:

> 3.  You can knock off a chess program faster in some other languages perhaps,
> but it will be slow.

I think you might be surprised at the speed you can get out of
some of the less-popular languages.

> I think that perhaps the "academic" languages like Lisp or Snoball might be
> interesting to play with ideas, since the engine is much more abstracted.

(Do you mean SNOBOL? I don't think there are many serious SNOBOL
fans left these days; in this respect it's different from (e.g.)
OCaml or Smalltalk.)

A brief digression on Lisp... The original LISP was certainly
an "academic language", but then *everything* was academic then.
Nowadays, there are many Lisps around, and it would be a mistake
to call them all "academic". There's Scheme, used almost exclusively
for teaching and designed with spartan simplicity as an overriding
principle. *Very* academic. There are things like Emacs Lisp and
Autolisp, designed for embedding into particular applications;
usually they're pretty lousy languages, but their lousiness is
of a very un-academic kind. And there's Common Lisp, which is
(in my opinion) an excellent language but again very un-academic.

--
g




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