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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 34, No. 40. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2020-05-20 14:45:44+00:00 From: Daniel JohnsonSubject: Re: [Humanist] 34.34: now we can search Dear Willard, Thank you to you and the whole crew for support of the search functionality. While playing around with it, I discovered by accident a post by "Randall Smith" from 1988 that seems a direct response to the recent "the 'secret' of a programming language?" discussion. To wit: > "I believe that there is no "best" language; the "best" language varies > task to task, even person to person [...] I have no doubt that dBase could > be used to write a word processor, or even a text parser. I can also play > bass guitar on my regular guitar by tuning the strings down, but this is > not an elegant solution. The difference between programming in C and dBase > is elegance. Certainly other languages will be more elegant than C for > specific tasks, but I appreciate C's flexibility and general > applicability. I also find that different word processors are better for > different types of writing. However, as a PhD student in Classics, I do > not have the time to learn a multitude of word processors or a multitude of > languages, as much as I would like to. Therefore, I have to pick a > language, and a word processor, which can perform all my tasks. Once I > have chosen, I find it easier to find a way to solve a new problem in the > old language than to start a new one from scratch." (source: https://dhhumanist.org/Archives/Virginia/v01/8803.1324.txt) There could be more of interest there; it just struck me out of the blue. Plus ça change, and all that. Best, Dan -- Daniel Johnson, Ph.D. English and Digital Humanities Librarian Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship, Hesburgh Libraries University of Notre Dame 250C Hesburgh Library Notre Dame, IN 46556 o: 574-631-3457 e: djohns27@nd.edu _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
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