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The truth about C and Unix history

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Re: The truth about C and Unix history

#31

Post by mojuba »

copsarebastards wrote: post #26
mojuba wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have called me a "Pascal devotee" back then, but I had eventually come to realize verbosity kills creativity and dumped Pascal for good. This { int a[10]; ... } wins over this begin var A: array[0..9] of Integer; ... end; quite simply because the latter takes longer to both read and write. The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. beg…

> The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again. facepalm Except Ruby, OCaml, Erlang, Lua, etc. Frankly, if verbosity is a significant limiting factor on your creativity, a) C is not the solution to your problem, and b) you weren't trying to solve any hard problems anyway. Seriously, if you're doing anything really hard, stuff l…

Frankly, if verbosity is not a limiting factor for you, then you weren't trying to solve hard problems in an elegant way.

Re: The truth about C and Unix history

#33

Post by throwawayaway »

barosl wrote: post #9

Wow, it's been a long time since I checked this joke for the last time! At that time I read the version that was translated into my mother tongue (Korean). Now I read this in its native form.

Impressed that people can progress in foreign languages to the point that they can get obscure and obtuse sarcasm!

Re: The truth about C and Unix history

#35

Post by VLM »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #6

This particular April Fool's joke goes back at least 30 years. I remember getting a chuckle out of it a long time ago. For context for younger readers, it might be worth pointing out that there was for a while a sort of rivalry between C and Pascal adherents. C was the more "modern" and "professional" language, while Pascal was a "teaching" language (or so some of the arguments went). Windows was coded in C, while Ma…

The perspective I had, having lived thru it, is once the professional / teaching separation happened, pascal was automatically doomed. There is a tension in american culture of educational vs vocational, and the vocational crowd disposed of pascal in a few short years. Very politically incorrect for adherents of that group to teach anything that isn't directly mentioned by name in job requirements or ivy league applications, and the educators realized you can teach "big O" and "quicksort" and "what is a finite automata" in any language, so they had no long term allegiance. So bye bye pascal.

(Another interesting analogy to Pascal is cursive handwriting... ever educator, ever, always claimed we'd be required to use it elsewhere although they personally find it a complete waste of time, typical emperor has no clothes or blind conformity to a dead belief system. My own kids are not being taught cursive in school, so progress is possible)

Nothing in IT is ever new, fundamentally the JVM concept is just a re-implementation of the "famous at that time" pascal p-code system. Compile pascal to p-code once, run that p-code on any system. And from memory, just like java, you end up needing customized sources for specific machines and specific versions of the p-code interpreter which eliminated that marketing bullet point in actual practice.

Re: The truth about C and Unix history

#36

Post by lmm »

copsarebastards wrote: post #26
mojuba wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have called me a "Pascal devotee" back then, but I had eventually come to realize verbosity kills creativity and dumped Pascal for good. This { int a[10]; ... } wins over this begin var A: array[0..9] of Integer; ... end; quite simply because the latter takes longer to both read and write. The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. beg…

> The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again. facepalm Except Ruby, OCaml, Erlang, Lua, etc. Frankly, if verbosity is a significant limiting factor on your creativity, a) C is not the solution to your problem, and b) you weren't trying to solve any hard problems anyway. Seriously, if you're doing anything really hard, stuff l…

Syntax limits everything, it only becomes more important as you're doing hard things. Being able to fit 10% more code on screen is a lot like being 10% smarter, which is the kind of thing you need to make the hard problems even possible.

Re: The truth about C and Unix history

#37

Post by jacquesm »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #6

This particular April Fool's joke goes back at least 30 years. I remember getting a chuckle out of it a long time ago. For context for younger readers, it might be worth pointing out that there was for a while a sort of rivalry between C and Pascal adherents. C was the more "modern" and "professional" language, while Pascal was a "teaching" language (or so some of the arguments went). Windows was coded in C, while Ma…

You forgot that (object) Pascal found it's niche in Borlands excellent 'Delphi' product and that to this day it has its adherents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28programming_language%...

There is also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Pascal

I've never used it but I've seen people using it and they were insanely productive and happy about the tools.

Re: The truth about C and Unix history

#38

Post by jacquesm »

copsarebastards wrote: post #26
mojuba wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have called me a "Pascal devotee" back then, but I had eventually come to realize verbosity kills creativity and dumped Pascal for good. This { int a[10]; ... } wins over this begin var A: array[0..9] of Integer; ... end; quite simply because the latter takes longer to both read and write. The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. beg…

> The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again. facepalm Except Ruby, OCaml, Erlang, Lua, etc. Frankly, if verbosity is a significant limiting factor on your creativity, a) C is not the solution to your problem, and b) you weren't trying to solve any hard problems anyway. Seriously, if you're doing anything really hard, stuff l…

Erlang wasn't exactly created in the past few decades (1986), neither was OCaml (a successor to 'Caml', dating back to 1985 or so).

Re: The truth about C and Unix history

#39

Post by jacquesm »

lmm wrote: post #36
copsarebastards wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again. facepalm Except Ruby, OCaml, Erlang, Lua, etc. Frankly, if verbosity is a significant limiting factor on your creativity, a) C is not the solution to your problem, and b) you weren't trying to solve any hard problems anyway. Seriously, if you're doing anything really hard, stuff l…

Syntax limits everything, it only becomes more important as you're doing hard things. Being able to fit 10% more code on screen is a lot like being 10% smarter, which is the kind of thing you need to make the hard problems even possible.

By that reasoning APL should rule, so there may be some kind of optimum.
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