> Beyond the hierarchy of knowledge and its pure snobbery, there is the
> problem that most graphic design types never learned programming. I tried
> and discovered something amazing, FORTRAN. It is one of the most elegantly
> engineered codes I ever tried to learn. It has a very compact command set,
> but what you can do with it is stunning. There are some principles in my
> intro to Java HTML that brought a similar, WOW. Then I realized because of
> how Java is put together it leads in exactly the opposite direction from
> FORTRAN, into a code mire of truly scary dimensions. COBOL the first code
> for business, is thoroughly ugly, and because it was designed to be used by
> business, its programs are vastly more ugly. Postscript which drives much of
> the visual world we see is also a very ugly language, even if at its deepest
> roots in linear algebra, the concepts are some of the most elegant of all
> mathematics. Maybe I take that judgement back a little. Adobe engineers had
> to do some pretty elegant stuff to set up the font families and make them
> work in applications. TeX has great elegance, LaTeX doesn't. I never got
> into C or C++ far enough to see its conceptual unity. From what I could see,
> I didn't particularly like it.
It's interesting you say that about C in comparison to FORTRAN -- C's command set is scarcely larger. One of things that I find fascinating about C how it has hardly changed since its inception (in contrast to FORTRAN) and it's still the language that more or less defines Unix. The only language manual/tutorial you really need is thirty years old (copyright Bell Telephone Labs) and at 260 pages still sells for $40.
I never really got into Lisp, but that's widely regarded as beautiful too. At long as you keep loops out of it, as God intended.
-- Andy