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Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982)

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Re: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982)

#61

Post by dade_ »

jhbadger wrote: post #56
palad1n wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/

But a similar quote about the young is completely real -- just not by Socrates (who after all wrote nothing), but rather by Aristotle -- Book II, Part 12 of his "Rhetoric" has him complaining about young people -- it's a long passage, but some gems "They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themse…

Youth unemployment explained in a quote: "They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones"

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982)

#62

Post by jcranmer »

BrissyCoder wrote: post #42
droptablemain wrote: post #5

"Real programmers aren't afraid of GOTO"

GOTO is still a legit way to cleanly break out of nested loops. I cringe whenever I hear normie programmers lament on how blanketly bad it is.

I prefer the syntax of newer languages that instead have you label the loop and then break/continue the loop of that level. It tends to make it a little clearer that you're doing a multi-level exit.

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982)

#63

Post by Asooka »

z3phyr wrote: post #35
fastball wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC wasn't a great experience for a lot of things back in the day unless you setup your own bouncer/relay.

Real programmers set up their own bouncer relays

Oh please, actual Real Programmers, just picked up the phone and whistled at 9.6kb/s.

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982)

#64

Post by Asooka »

throwaway772398 wrote: post #16
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

> It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the Russkies. Keep in mind that despite Real Programmers being referred to as "he" throughout the article, the Real Programmer who headed that effort was a "she" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)

Margaret Hamilton did not head the effort. She was a manager on the project, but she didn’t join until relatively late. At the time of Apollo 11 she was in charge of the Command Module’s software ( https://www.doneyles.com/LM/ORG/index.html ), but most of the work had been done by the time she assumed that position. She later became head of the whole software department, and had a lot of responsibility for modificati…

Real programmers don't reply to political bait.

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982)

#66

Post by jcelerier »

stesch wrote: post #65

The popularity of this essay in the 1980s poisoned so many minds and is one of the reasons we have to deal with so much bullshit today.

> The popularity of this essay in the 1980s poisoned so many minds and is one of the reasons we have to deal with so much bullshit today.

If the people who read this essay don't get that it's a joke after at most the first sentence, you have bigger problems than that.

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982)

#67

Post by svat »

Donald Knuth wrote TeX in Pascal. I think he chose it because it was the language most widely available at the time in universities where people wanted to use TeX; many were already using Pascal for teaching. (The first version had been written in SAIL, because it was the language available at the Stanford AI Lab where he had computer access.)

Because Pascal did not have good support for strings and variable-length arrays, TeX manages all its own memory (allocating and freeing from a single giant Pascal array called “mem”); because Pascal did not have “break” or “return” he implemented those features himself with a preprocessor and a certain disciplined use of goto; because Pascal required certain things (type declarations, labels) to be all in the same place and other things to be scattered apart, he wrote a preprocessor to rearrange sections of a program in any order; because Pascal compilers varied in their support for features like pointers and nested procedures, TeX uses only a very restricted subset of Pascal.

Real programmers do whatever it takes.

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982)

#70

Post by empath75 »

svat wrote: post #67

Donald Knuth wrote TeX in Pascal. I think he chose it because it was the language most widely available at the time in universities where people wanted to use TeX; many were already using Pascal for teaching. (The first version had been written in SAIL, because it was the language available at the Stanford AI Lab where he had computer access.) Because Pascal did not have good support for strings and variable-length a…

This essay was entirely sarcastic, in case you missed that.
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