Now I Want to Fight in the Programming Jihad

[liralen]

The Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming

Yes. I think about a third of my flist is going to die laughing, and the other two-thirds will be what is she on?

Comments

[cmc42.livejournal.com]

*grins at the Turing one*

*Stops reading*

Not a good idea in the middle of my Computer Science degree exams lol. I'll read the rest of them after the 24th May.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

lol!! Yes.

It would be terrible to mix this with reality. Explosive even.

[tallcedars.livejournal.com]

I'd wondered about C. And Ruby conferences. That clears up a lot. Thanks.

Have fun storming the processor.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

It does, doesn't it?? *laughs and laughs*

I shall do my best!!

[jackwilliambell.livejournal.com]

*SNERK*!

Of course, mention not FORTH pop!

[liralen.livejournal.com]

*giggles far too much*

Yes!!

[momijizukamori]

I lol'd. Oh programming, I have such a love-hate relationship with you.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

*giggles*

[archangelbeth]

AHAHAHAH!

1972 - Alain Colmerauer designs the logic language Prolog. His goal is to create a language with the intelligence of a two year old. He proves he has reached his goal by showing a Prolog session that says "No." to every query.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

I *love* the graphic.

Oh, lord.

Yes. I NEED to have a world where magic works in programing language... or maybe a magician that uses that instead of the gobbilty gook of other mere mortals.

One thing about the Dresden world, everyone uses their own word and gesture set, whatever invokes their power... so it would fit in there quite bemusingly well.

[archangelbeth]

There's a whole series of books where magic = computer language... Ah, here's an omnibus of the first two books. http://www.librarything.com/work/188213 (http://www.librarything.com/topic/59308 suggests others, too...)

I was taking Prolog, as you can guess, and was...... not impressed. So. Not. Impressed. Thus, the doodle.

[tallcedars.livejournal.com]

There's also a pretty amusing ongoing series by Kelly McCullough, starting with WebMage (http://www.kellymccullough.com/).

Great doodle!

[liralen.livejournal.com]

OOoo... Thank you for the link, too!

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Ah ha!

[erikred.livejournal.com]

1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

This shouldn't make me laugh anywhere near as much as it does, but it gets me every time.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

YES!!! Yes again and YES!

*falls over giggling*

[sarakate.livejournal.com]

I think the Pascal entry needs more semicolons.

When I was in college I worked in the engineering computer labs, assisting students. I was required to know FORTRAN for the job (and, in fact, kicked butt at it), because all engineering students had to take it, but only the CS majors had to take Pascal and I didn't know it. Nonetheless, I would often give in to the desperate pleas of CS students to just come look at it anyway even though I told them I didn't know the language. "I think you're missing a semicolon," was the one single piece of advice I could possibly give.

The success rate of that was amazing -- I bet it was upwards of 75%.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

I bet!!

I loved FORTRAN, it worked the way I thought it should. Pascal... *shakes head*

*laughs* I love your solution...

[sarakate.livejournal.com]

On an only slightly related tangent, is there any chance that (a) you were involved in coding the DTUs for PernMUSH and (b) you might still have some of that code somewhere? I know someone who knows someone who's attempting to recreate it for their own game, and is running into problems, so I thought I'd mention it in case you could and were willing to help.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

I was not! But I can ask some other members of the Horde that were on that MUSH to see if they know whom to contact.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

I've asked about and Lydia/Fuzz seems to be the name that comes up. I don't have any contact info, though...

[akuni.livejournal.com]

Ahahaha! When I was eight, I was queen of BASIC on my PCJr (no, it didn't spontaneously combust). Forget 'Hello, world!!', I had magazines that told me how to type in the code for Q-bert! *snicker*

Would you believe they were still requiring CS students to take COBOL in the late 90s? *beats head on desk* On the up side, the year I joined the program was the year they finally switched the first year teaching language to Java... from Fortran. ;) I get that students have to be able to work on legacy systems when they go out into the workforce, but wow.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

lol.

My MOM knows COBOL and that's... frightening.

hee. Go you with Q-bert!!

Given that, now, any language they learn in school will be obsolete by the time they get out, it's... kind of intriguing to think about how to teach programming that isn't dependent on the language itself.

I mean... English restricts how we think, if one really thinks about it; but it's SO much more evident that a programming language either gets in the way of or facilities how one thinks about a problem. So it's so much more desirable to have a language one can think easily in. I know a lot of admins who *think* in perl, and when I was still programming I used to dream in C++. *laughs*

Odd how the human mind can work...