Arc Forumnew | comments | leaders | submitlogin
3 points by lojic 6099 days ago | link | parent

I stopped reading when the author's response to a question regarding the power of Factor included the following:

"Factor is a Turing-complete programming language whose programs are capable of doing whatever any other programming language can do."



3 points by are 6099 days ago | link

I think he was trying to make the point that the word "power", when used about programming languages, is either:

1) Well-defined in terms of computability, but then rather uninteresting, since all programming languages are Turing-complete.

or:

2) So ridiculously ill-defined as to be meaningless.

Instead of arguing about which language is the more "powerful", one should be arguing in terms of which sets of problems have efficient (in terms of programmer time and maybe learning curves) solutions.

-----