I learned C in 1984 when it still primitive, played with Forth because it was cool, but used Pascal at work. Add to that the APL I briefly played with in graduate school. In those days the choice of languages was almost small enough to try all of them. Today it's impossible.
Programming Language choices: Pascal, LOGO, Forth, Prolog, C (1986) [video]
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Re: Programming Language choices: Pascal, LOGO, Forth, Prolog, C (1986) [video]
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idk why but even highly knowledgeable people capitalize random tech words. In the Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate, Tanenbaum regularly calls it LINUX (maybe a habit because UNIX is smallcaps'd per the trademark?). Lisp is often called LISP (check Wikiquote for ample examples), although this is forgivable since Lisp really did used to be an all-caps acronym.
Typewriters and their intrinsically limited rich-text capabilities encouraged that all-caps use for distinction. In the case of Unix, it was trademarked as all-caps, for some reason ('Multics' was not) - so for Linux it may have seemed to follow for consistence.
According to Dennis Ritchie from the Jargon File:
"Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately ‘UNIX’ or ‘Unix’; both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the ‘UNIX’ spelling originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System because “we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps.” Later, dmr tried to get the spelling changed to ‘Unix’ in a couple of Bell Labs papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his words) “wimped out” on the issue. So, while the trademark today is ‘UNIX’, both capitalizations are grounded in ancient usage; the Jargon File uses ‘Unix’ in deference to dmr's wishes.
Re: Programming Language choices: Pascal, LOGO, Forth, Prolog, C (1986) [video]
#33Good ol' C, still in the 'most used' group 40 years later. The other four? Not so much today.
C has been a disaster for software stability and security. We should have stuck with Ada or Oberon.
Re: Programming Language choices: Pascal, LOGO, Forth, Prolog, C (1986) [video]
#34The Nimbus used in the C demonstration seems to be a 16bit 80186 computer. It runs DOS but is not PC compatible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus
Every 80186 DOS machine was like that, the most famous one in the USA being the Tandy 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_2000 The Mindset was another, that languished in obscurity until a cache of them were found at Computer Reset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset_(computer) The 186 had on-chip stuff (timers, an interrupt controller, and so forth) at I/O addresses where the PC had different stuff offboard…
> languished in obscurity until a cache of them were found at Computer Reset
I never learn of such events until it’s decades too late.
Re: Programming Language choices: Pascal, LOGO, Forth, Prolog, C (1986) [video]
#35I used to enjoy LOGO when I was a kid. Used Microworlds EX to make games. Shame it has fallen out of favor as an educational tool. Taught me a lot about scripting and paying attention to syntax.
We're building a 3D game development environment that uses an enhanced version of Logo. It has 'spaces' that start out simple and get more complex. You can check out our progress so far at https://turtlespaces.org
That actually looks perfect! I never thought of Logo as a data processing language or anything like that, but I have always associated it with making games because it is so well suited for it. This is pretty much exactly what I was missing about using LOGO. Im going to keep my eye on this! Thanks