A Failure of Sarcasm
As people who have known me a long time will understand, I was clearly not born to dance, appreciate opera, or play competitive sports. I may also be incapable of sarcasm, perhaps because I don't use it much and nobody expects it.
Ok. A couple of people have written to me in shock with respect to my May 12, 2007 entry, in which I said this:
In that never-to-be-sufficiently-despised language Pascal, you can take a string buffer and strip out any character not falling into a predefined set of characters using one (short) line of code.
They took me literally and wondered why a famous Pascal guy would say that. Egad. Full-bore sarcasm here, people! I carry few grudges, but there is one that is probably eternal: My grudge against the dorks and flamers who waged war on my "kiddie language" way back when Pascal and C were considered peers. They slandered it in the press. They slandered it in the streets and on the rooftops. They slandered it in my face. The war is over, and my side lost a long time ago. I won't argue the merits anymore, though I have long had powerful suspicions (unconfirmable as long as source code is not revealed) that the vast majority of buffer overflow exploits tormenting us these days can be traced to the unbounded string functions in the standard C library. Perhaps the technology industry gets the kind of programming language that it deserves.
Anyway. My point was to state that Pascal can handle a particular programming challenge with virtually no effort. My real target was lazy programmers, or perhaps insufficiently powerful runtime libraries of server-side languages that I'm not good at. In this particular case, I wasn't criticizing C, but was simply making the point that my often-slandered kiddie language could easily solve an issue that online programmers are either unwilling or unable to solve.
I have fooled with a great many programming languages. I'm good at a few, and I hold a few in high regard. (The two sets don't completely overlap.) But when pressed, I will say two things:
1. I am an assembly language programmer, and
2. I am a Pascal programmer.
If CodeGear ever releases a Turbo Erlang I will give it a go. (Parallel processing is in many respects the Last Frontier in coding.) But in the realm of high-level languages, I have only one love, per omnia saecula saeculorum.