Surveying Languages/The History Thereof

I've decided that I'm pretty psyched about looking into Lisp and Prolog, especially.  AI's pretty exciting, after all.  Don't think anyone's going to contest that.  (Even the people who are afraid of robots taking over the world are still, technically, excited about it, right?  Just not in the positive sense...)

It was surprising to see how similar some of the syntax rules of ALGOL and BASIC are to the ones we've already studied.  Very convenient for us!  Or maybe it's inconvenient...as they're all bound to start blending together pretty soon.

Anywho, I'm not going to go into the programming language history that we looked at in the textbook, as there are plenty of sources on the interweb that have dealt with the stuff much more expertly than I could. Here's a nice little graphical history that our professor shared with us, if you're interested. 

It's cute how I'm acting like people other than those in the class are reading this, isn't it?

As a young computer scientist about to be unceremoniously tossed out into the fighting pits workplace, I don't find Mr. Brin's article bemoaning the lost age of students writing BASIC-level code to be especially encouraging.  I'm assuming that he considers experience with higher-level languages to be less helpful because you deal less directly with the inner workings of the computer itself, which makes sense...  It's good that our class is going to be looking at some BASIC this semester, then.  Personally, I'm very happy about this prospect.  Working with Python and Java so far, I've kind of felt like, "Oh, this is how it works because this is how it works," which doesn't feel like an altogether satisfactory explanation. 

One last tidbit:
I want to draw attention to Lewis and Neumann's observation that "programmers, despite their professed appreciation of logical thought, are not immune to a kind of mythology."  This is a beautiful sentence, for one thing.  Whenever people invest themselves and their time in anything, they're bound to defend it against any would-be attackers.  We're programmed this way.  Let's just keep this in mind when Wednesday's debate rolls around.