Comments | schnee: Lessons (not) learned

schnee

Lessons (not) learned

Jul 06, 2019 13:49

An interesting tidbit from the TeXhax mailing list …

Context: an inquiry about TeX packages for writing chemistry papers that would work with plain TeX, without requiring LaTeX; a pointer to https://ctan.org/topic/chemistry was provided, with the note that unfortunately this didn't allow filtering LaTeX-only packages. Another user then suggested ( Read more... )

algol, vms, c, lessons not learned, unix, latex

Comments 5

thewayne November 8 2019, 07:53:33 UTC

The most exotic language encounter that I ever had was briefly looking through a MUMPS manual. About 35 years ago I had a Prolog interpreter for my TRS-80 Model 100, and the thing it did best was crash the computer. (still have the computer, no idea what happened to that cassette ( ... )

schnee November 8 2019, 15:06:24 UTC

About 35 years ago I had a Prolog interpreter for my TRS-80 Model 100, and the thing it did best was crash the computer.

Ah yes, the good old days. It sure is nice that software development has improved so much and that crashes and the like are a thing of the past now! :)

Never was a fan of Pascal (and its variants, liek Modula-2 and Oberon). I think Kernighan's critique is on point, but bveyond that it also never felt right to me. (And of course Kernighan is responsible for C, which I believe is single-handedly responsible for many of the software problems we're facing today, from crashes to security issues to ... shall we say unexpected arithmetic [such as non-associative addition], simply by presenting itself as something it's not [a high-level language]. But I digress.)

I used to like Perl a lot; Python, like Pascal, feels unnatural to me. (Though I do like how things like Jupyter and numpy/sympy allow me to easily work with symbolic equations.)

Come to think of it I'm not sure what I'd consider a good language. (Maybe I ( ... )

thewayne November 8 2019, 16:51:08 UTC

I started to say: you don't like C, Pascal et al, Python: what do you like ( ... )

schnee November 8 2019, 19:52:56 UTC

Heh. I hope I'm not coming across as too curmudgeonly ... truth to be told I actually think Java isn't too bad (or was; I don't really know current Java incarnations). I've used Smalltalk-80 once, and thought it was neat, if rather too self-contained to be useful for much beyond writing Smalltalk-80 programming environments. :P And Perl, yes - Perl 5, that is, I'm not familiar with Raku.

But thinking about it, it's actually true I'm not a fan of most programming languages. Most seem to be created with someone other than the user (i.e. programmer) in mind.

COBOL handling GUIs and relational databases sounds pretty crazy. Then again there's also CobolScript (the COBOL version of Javascript, as I understand it), so I suppose anything's possible.

Thread 5