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I wish people would stop comparing programming languages to Hammers. It's a meaningless meme. Yes, they are tools, but comparing them to Hammers is 100% ridiculous.

A language is not a hammer. It is a tool. You know what else are tools? Chainsaws, databases, lasers, and tunnel boring machines that cost tens of millions of dollars.

There are plenty of conferences about tools.



You need to go further and accept that programming languages are also not tools.


If they're not tools, then what are they? Where do you draw the line?


They're languages, or notations. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notation_for_differentiation there's different schools of thought on what's easiest to read, while the fundamentals are essentially the same.

Calculus is a tool, but how we write it is just the notation. Similarly, computer programming (or perhaps a subfield like functional programming) is the tool, and a particular language is just the notation for writing it down.


Mental problem solving paradigms.




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