Why study programming language concepts?
There are several good reasons to study not just a given programming language, but the concepts that are common to programming languages as well as those that distinguish one from another… 1. Understanding the concepts underlying programming languages increases your capacity to express ideas about computation. And expressing ideas about computation is the profession you’ve chosen. Your book says that “it is widely believed that the depth at which we can think is influenced by the expressive power of the language in which we communicate our thoughts.” That’s a restatement of something called the “Whorf Hypothesis” (no relation to the Klingon — different spelling). Benjamin Whorf believed that the language a person or, more appropriately, a culture uses constrains what that person or culture can think. That same idea shows up in Orwell’s “1984” in the form of “newspeak” (if you haven’t read it by now, don’t start now…you don’t have time…go rent the movie instead). It’s a popular o
