The new programming language
When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of programming they've done. 99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions. All popular languages are equally good at this. So one can easily spend one's whole career operating in the intersection of popular programming languages. But the other .5% of programming is disproportionately interesting. If you want to learn what it consists of, the weirdness of weird languages is a good clue to follow. Weird languages aren't weird by accident. Not the good ones, at least. The weirdness of the good ones usually implies the existence of some form of programming that's not just the usual gluing together of library calls. A concrete example: Lisp macros. Lisp macros seem weird even to many Lisp programmers. They're not only not in the intersection of popular languages, but by their natu