321–330 of 338 posts
Bash users represent! Seriously, Bash is fucking beautiful once you really dig into it. Pipes are unbelievably elegant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> perhaps better saved for a blog post Please do write it, and submit it to HN! This is the sort of material nearly all of us would love to read.
It'd certainly be interesting to relate a multi-decade software project from the outside :-) I will have to talk to my father about this... and explain why folks on the internet must hear his stories. In the interim, would anyone happen to have an example of a good secondhand account of a software project? A basis or, at the least, an inspiration for how to proceed.
The Soul of A New Machine
by Tracy Kidder.
About the race to build a new minicomputer, by a team at Data General.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
Prize winning book.
We use a business-basic style language called ProvideX[1] from the mid 80s. 99% of our codebase is GOTOs, GOSUBs, and PERFORMs. It's a mess to deal with. But at the same time, the language has a database layer built in that (while slow) works well enough for our uses, it has a GUI toolkit that works cross platform, and you can run the same GUI panel via a web browser through a shim that the company created. That's th…
> I can make a program and GUI, and have it run on windows, linux, osx, and the web without any changes. you should check out electron https://github.com/atom/electron
There is still the database, the "server side" code, and unless we are going with isometric javascript, the client side code separate from the server side.
It's just taking some adjustments from a truly monolithic codebase where everything is in one language, one codebase, one "environment", to splitting it up into smaller parts and API-ifying everything to allow an easier separation.
It sounds silly, but even choosing an editor is a task, as providex includes their own IDE! (i'm rooting for atom!)
Although I mainly write code in Python, JavaScript and Go, I have a SaaS web application that was written in the early 2000s using ColdFusion (CFML) which I still support (started at v5 and now runs on v8). In the mid to late nineties (and early 00s) it was one of the best ways to write web applications (it was actually the first Application server as far as I know). But today is 2016 and ColdFusion is one of the lea…
I would attribute that to the passionate community and open source version, Lucee.
It took about 5 minutes to chug through 3 months of sales data and produce a list of content -> content pairings & weights.
Then I discovered Python, cursed my manager, and the same algorithm ran in <1s on the same data.
I started out with Perl and I still occasionally use it today. There's nothing I especially like about Perl that other languages cannot do just as well, or even better, but at the time I started using it, it seemed pretty powerful. It's still a formidable language and a viable means to build a solution for some problems—provided you don't have to collaborate with anyone. It's hard to find people willing to work with…
My favourite language in FreePascal's dialect of ObjectPascal (which is largely derived from the work Borland did with Delphi, which itself is largely derived from Borland's Turbo Pascal). It has all the benefits of a modern language -- strong typing, generics, operator overloading, objects, metaclasses, dynamic arrays, interfaces, RTTI, dynamic dispatch, method pointers, type helpers, true modules, fast compile time…
I've used Yeti[1][2] to write an Android app for personal use (on Nook Touch) that I couldn't force myself to write in Java. It made the task much more fun for me and allowed me to finish after I got a serious case of "author's block" trying to code it in Java. Yeti is ML-like and runs on JVM 1.4+ [1] http://dot.planet.ee/yeti/intro.html [2] http://mth.github.io/yeti/
Could you share a little more feedback about what using the language was like? Did you like it overall? If you've used Standard ML or OCaml (OCaml-Java), how would you say it compares?
At work a colleague wrote a software to calculate some numbers for some scientific papers in Logo ( you remember the turtle?) I thought he was joking but wasn't.
Though maybe designed primarily to help teach kids programming / logic etc., Logo is actually at least moderately powerful, since it is a variant of Lisp.