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Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)

ralsina.me

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Re: Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)

#31

Post by nefitty »

V-2 wrote: post #22
nefitty wrote: post #3

Well, that name probably didn't help much either.

Why? Honest question - a non-native speaker here. Does it have any hidden connotations, or just weird

"Jorf" is just an ugly word. It also evokes guttural body sounds like "barf" and "urgh", the kind someone makes when they're sick... It might be just from a native English speaker's perspective. I know English in general is not an appealing language to some ears from non-English speaking countries.

Re: Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)

#32

Post by z3r0d4v3 »

V-2 wrote: post #29
z3r0d4v3 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whoa - ty 4 the link man, i just tested it and got ethically blewn away! screener: http://mnml.is/hn/jorf_on_war.png

So it works? Did you run any code? Jorf is about to witness its revival :)

i just extracted all the 3 zips into seperate dirs, the last contained a jorf.exe, which i started from a dosbox, spinned away flawless - have no idea about what's in what archive thou

Re: Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)

#33

Post by laumars »

mmahemoff wrote: post #12

"If he start­ed Jorf in 1987, that means he start­ed it around the same time Perl 1.0, (and the syn­tax is much nicer ;-). He start­ed it around the same time Gui­do start­ed Python." This is quite interesting as it's not really clear a better syntax would automatically make it "win" over other languages, or even that it's a significant factor. Maybe a prerequisite in most cases, but I think here are a lot of other f…

> * The nature of the early adopter individuals and companies (thought experiment: young Mark Zuckerberg sits down one night and proceeds to write thefacebook v0.0.0.0.1 in Perl, not PHP)

A couple of points:

01) PHP was already very well established when Zuckerberg wrote thefacebook. As was Perl, Python, ASP.NET, Cold Fusion, and a few Java solutions (such as Tomcat) too. While it feels like Facebook has been around since forever, it's actually quite a recent development relative to the age of the web. My point being that it wasn't Facebook that made PHP big.

10) You theorise about what might have happened if early prototypes of thefacebook written in Perl but that was actually the original language Zuckerberg favoured (eg https://gist.github.com/philfreo/7257723).

Re: Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)

#34

Post by pjmlp »

brusch64 wrote: post #23
V-2 wrote: post #19

Intrigued, I did some googling and found this God-forgotten FTP :) ftp://ftp.chatnfiles.com/Simtel-CDroms/Simtel-for-Ms-Dos-march-97-2-of-2/disc2/misclang/00_index.htm - jorf21_3.zip contains a manual :) Some interesting constructs / keywords, eg. For (Col = 0 thru 4) | Display B Music 5 times And some insights: The Windows culture is the culture of the WinProc; programs dominated by massive unstructured switch state…

Regarding the "Windows culture": WinProc programming was indeed pretty horrible. Didn't really program a lot in WinProc - but I've cut my teeth with MFC which was supposed to make it better. They broke down the big switch in the program and created classes (the c in MFC) and macros. The VCL of Borland was more abstracted, but we've used MFC. I am pretty happy that I don't have to do this any more. When I started with…

Coming from a Borland background, MFC was pretty bad when compared with any of its frameworks.

However in MFC's defense I think one can blame it on Microsoft's study group. I read somewhere that the Afx prefix came from their original design. A framework close in spirit to OWL, but their study group deemed it to high level.

So they made it a thin wrapper over Win16 instead.

On my case, the few cases I was forced outside OWL and MFC into pure C land, I use a set of macros from the Windows SDK.

They weren't properly documented, but with the Windows 3.1 SDK Microsoft created a kind of "type safe" handles and message dispatch macros, which relieved the WndProc pain.

Nevertheless, Xlib was even worse.

Re: Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)

#36

Post by z3r0d4v3 »

atmosx wrote: post #30
z3r0d4v3 wrote: post #28

http://mnml.is/hn/jorf_on_war.png

interesting license.

  RESTRICTION ON THOSE WHO PROFIT BY ENCOURAGING WAR (MESSAGE 4 OF 4)
  No JORF Company product may be used by any individual or organization
  responsible for the production or storage of chemical, biological or
  nuclear weapons. This product may not be used in any weapons system.
  If you work for such a company, you are free to use JORF company
  products at home for personal purposes, but you may not use this program
  for you employer's benefit. If not now, when? If not you, who?
for those ASCII fetishists

Re: Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)

#38

Post by z3r0d4v3 »

Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #37
z3r0d4v3 wrote: post #28

http://mnml.is/hn/jorf_on_war.png

Meh, that is a bit like the iTunes EULA. You are not allowed to use it to make weapons of mass destruction. Maybe it is removed by now, but I found it hillarious back in the day.

yeah, let me just upload the last few songs - then my WMD is ready to rock that continent

vs

an IDE - kinda...

Re: Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)

#39

Post by V-2 »

nefitty wrote: post #31
V-2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Honest question - a non-native speaker here. Does it have any hidden connotations, or just weird

"Jorf" is just an ugly word. It also evokes guttural body sounds like "barf" and "urgh", the kind someone makes when they're sick... It might be just from a native English speaker's perspective. I know English in general is not an appealing language to some ears from non-English speaking countries.

Thanks for shedding some light on it. Personally I quite like the sound of English (my native tongue being Polish), and "jorf" doesn't sound to me any worse than Jeff or Ralph :) but obviously I don't have the same sensitivity as native speakers.

Re: Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)

#40

Post by jim_lawless »

In that same era, there were other proprietary programming languages just outside the mainstream that also attempted to abstract the low-level details of working with the Windows API.

The Whitewater Group's Actor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_(programming_language)

Liana ( the formatting for the article below renders strangely in my browser ):

http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/the-liana-programming-language/18...

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