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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)

#41

Post by mmahemoff »

laumars wrote: post #33
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…

1) True, I was a casual user of PHP before TheFacebook and remain so. The main point of the counterfactual is about Perl, ie that Perl probably would have retained a bigger part of the dev ecosystem. Though it's also true that a product like HHVM may never have happened.

2) Nice! #TIL

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

INTPenis wrote: post #11
x5n1 wrote: post #5

borf? barf? can't think of many words ending in rf. bark? Barf Corf Curf Kerf Serf Surf Turf Zarf

Serf would be a nice marketing word today I think, you could make a little picture that depicts the language as being in serfdom to the user. ;) Maybe I've had too much coffee, or not enough, I forget how that works. Whatever the case, I haven't drunk the exact right amount.

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by skissane »

icebraining wrote: post #15
INTPenis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serf would be a nice marketing word today I think, you could make a little picture that depicts the language as being in serfdom to the user. ;) Maybe I've had too much coffee, or not enough, I forget how that works. Whatever the case, I haven't drunk the exact right amount.

https://www.serfdom.io/

and https://serf.apache.org too

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

#44

Post by gecko »

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…

You know what's ridiculous? I totally agree that WndProc was horrible. But the web community is now reinventing it so directly that all I can do is bang my head repeatedly on my desk.

Have you seen Facebook's Flux/Dispatcher framework, for example? The Dispatcher is usually a massive switch statement that takes a single argument, which will be a record field that corresponds with the event type. It's exactly like switching on uMsg and then casting lParam to the relevant struct. And this is considered one of the absolute best web frameworks available right now.

On the bright side, I suppose we can look forward to equivalents of message crackers, OWL, and MFC for React soon enough.

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

#45

Post by mstade »

gecko wrote: post #44
brusch64 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You know what's ridiculous? I totally agree that WndProc was horrible. But the web community is now reinventing it so directly that all I can do is bang my head repeatedly on my desk. Have you seen Facebook's Flux/Dispatcher framework, for example? The Dispatcher is usually a massive switch statement that takes a single argument, which will be a record field that corresponds with the event type. It's exactly like swi…

Haha yes, this is so on point it makes me laugh and then want to cry a little bit. Also, they host conferences for these things, where the kool-aid is a-plenty.

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

#46

Post by laumars »

mmahemoff wrote: post #41
laumars wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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…

1) True, I was a casual user of PHP before TheFacebook and remain so. The main point of the counterfactual is about Perl, ie that Perl probably would have retained a bigger part of the dev ecosystem. Though it's also true that a product like HHVM may never have happened. 2) Nice! #TIL

I don't think it's fair to say that Perls lack of retention for any sizable part of the modern web development ecosystem was down to it's performance. Since the days of Apache 1.x Perl has had native C bindings for httpd via mod_perl, which unsurprisingly runs circles around FastCGI and the even slower standard CGI.

It's also worth remembering that Ruby didn't really take off as a major force for web development until around a decade ago - after Facebook was created - when the Rails framework was released. The reason I bring Ruby into the discussion is because Ruby's performance is roughly on a par with Perl's while having an arguably superior web framework (Rails) to Perl's CGI or mod_perl modules.

As much as I love Perl (it's genuinely one of my favourite languages), it really can be a complete pig to work with at times due to it's tendency to encourage code golfing and the many counterintuitive language features that were presumably inspired from shell scripting / awk. This weird and often unexpected complexity is what I think drove a lot of people away. PHP on the other hand, was purposely designed to be a simple language for web development. So while PHP did take some inspiration from Perl, it was more idiomatic to C than Perl was. Which meant it was an easier language for developers to adopt (also be in mind that ASP - which was predominantly VBScript - was heavily used and PHP was easier to adopt than Perl).

At least that's how I remember things back when I used to develop in the 90s

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

#47

Post by V-2 »

z3r0d4v3 wrote: post #26
V-2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this: ftp://ftp.chatnfiles.com/Simtel-CDroms/Simtel-for-Ms-Dos-march-97-2-of-2/disc2/misclang/00_index.htm Three Jorf archives there, binaries, manual etc. could be the whole thing for all I know. Not tested : )

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

Anyway, it's interesting that he singled out nuclear weapons, but eg. landmines would be just fine

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

z3r0d4v3 wrote: post #38
Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by Johnny_Brahms »

z3r0d4v3 wrote: post #38
Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It always struck me as kind of odd. This was before the iphone, but even counting iphone apps I haven't been able to come up with a way using itunes to deploy WMDs that isn't horribly contrived.

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

#50

Post by narrator »

gecko wrote: post #44
brusch64 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You know what's ridiculous? I totally agree that WndProc was horrible. But the web community is now reinventing it so directly that all I can do is bang my head repeatedly on my desk. Have you seen Facebook's Flux/Dispatcher framework, for example? The Dispatcher is usually a massive switch statement that takes a single argument, which will be a record field that corresponds with the event type. It's exactly like swi…

One thing that also reminds me of Windows culture in web development is the continuous reinvention of how to do the same old boring stuff.
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