Language and Thinking

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I'm fortunate enough to be sitting in on some training and the ice breaker at the beginning was to say which language one liked the most. Most in the room went with what they use for work, C#, but of course I had to break the flow and say I prefer Perl and Javascript in terms of raw language more than anything at the moment.

Talking about it later I brought up the old Sapir Whorf notion of language affecting thinking and problem solving and it's funny how you have a thought and seems to start jumping out at you all over the place. Tonight I ran into (courtesy of Raganwald) the following quotes regarding that idea:

"The connection between the language in which we think/program and theproblems
and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reasonrestricting
language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best
dangerous." - Bjarne Stroustrup

"The very fact that it's possible to write messy programs in Perl isalso what
makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perlthan they could ever
be in a language that attempts to enforcecleanliness. The potential for
greater good goes right along with thepotential for greater evil." - Larry Wall

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