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neauoire mentions appreciating a lesson from a Smalltalk book and follows up with:
Before anyone takes a shot, I’m not saying that Smalltalk is necessarily a good implementation of the idea, I’m just saying that the phrasing is very lucid.
That is legit. I’ve learned a lot from books about languages that aren’t necessarily my fave languages, like Smalltalk, Perl, and even COBOL.
Books like Design Patterns, Principles of Program Design, and Deep C Secrets comes to mind,
Sometimes people who are stuck in a bad language need to develop discipline or structure or formalize their thinking since otherwise they’d be lost (since their language doesn’t let them create abstraction) and that can be interesting. It can also help us in langages that do have good metaprogramming facilities; there’s this old adage that most of the patterns in Design Patterns are like one line of Lisp (for example, why do you need Template Method or Visitor when you can just pass a proc🤦🏻♀️) but sometimes it can help you know what that line should be.
I’m not recommending them more than I do awesome books like PAIP or On Lisp. But I just went through this brief patch in my twenties when I liked programming books I guess.
In this case, the specific lesson, is actually a good reason why I love Emacs.♥︎