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aarroyoc | 5 months ago

> As a mathematician doing a fair amount of numerical analysis, I must know several programming languages, all of which do roughly the same sort of thing.

But Mercury is not a language of the same paradigm as those (imperative, array oriented maybe). It's a logical programming language which I must guess, you probably never used any language of this category. In fact many features of logic programming languages never made to mainstream programming languages or they're behind some uncommon libraries.

discuss

hodgehog11|5 months ago

For sure, I've never used a language of this paradigm. I'm also bothered by the fact that I don't have a single good reason why I should, and would love to know if somebody has one. The currently given reason is curiosity.

I guess that is my point; all of the languages I know are of the same paradigm, but I need to know them all for work. So I disagree with the assertion that only languages of a different paradigm from the one you know is worth learning.

Jtsummers|5 months ago

> I guess that is my point; all of the languages I know are of the same paradigm, but I need to know them all for work. So I disagree with the assertion that only languages of a different paradigm from the one you know is worth learning.

I think you're taking that statement too literally, and way too seriously. Many of the epigrams are a bit tongue in cheek, and that one is too.

https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1982-perlis.pdf - Full list as a PDF

127 is instructive here:

> 127. Epigrams scorn detail and make a point: They are a superb high-level documentation.

Don't take them literally and act like they're gospel truths you must live your life by. That's not what Perlis was going for with them. Just like you shouldn't take DRY (don't repeat yourself) literally. You should use judgement.

If you need to learn Fortran to write your numeric code, even though Fortran isn't teaching you anything, you should learn Fortran. You have a job to do. But if you don't need to learn Fortran for work, and it has nothing to offer over the other languages you know, why bother with it? That's the key point of the epigram.