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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
mlooney

Comic for Wednesday, May 25, 2022

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7 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Are you suggesting that a significant portion of programming language problems stem from apathy or laziness on the part of the programmers?

The worst code I've seen is from people who dabble. People who have to code for a living tend to do better because they understand that they will have to revisit it.

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28 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Are you suggesting that a significant portion of programming language problems stem from apathy or laziness on the part of the programmers?

If he's not, I am.

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

Dartmouth BASIC was weird.

Relative to what? Seemed like a breath of fresh air relative to FORTRAN in 1972.

LISP is weird. It's also a great language.

 

1 hour ago, mlooney said:

Of course had Mr. Gates not written a BASIC  interpreter we would have had a structured version of it as the default standard. 

Gates and company ported Dartmouth BASIC for 8 bit machines. That's not the same as writing it. It was available to them because the code was shared in the academic environment. Their subsequent treatment of the original authors, Kurtz and Kemeny, fills me with disgust. I'll grant that MIcrosoft added many very useful extensions to their Basic, and it was stable, and fast. I don't know how it was originally, but by the 1980s, it was no longer exactly an interpreter, it tokenized the keywords, much like USCD Pascal and Java.

Fast? Yes, fast. Microsoft Basic code executed fast enough to implement interactive games and other real time stuff. Yes, the compiled version was faster. Acknowledged.

 

1 hour ago, mlooney said:

According to Wikipedia the original idea for BASIC was for the whole of the school, not just the STEM students to have access to a computer and do work in close to real time.

Ah, that makes sense. It was easy to learn.

You've got to use what your department uses. I had the unfortunate experience to be taught Algol by an elitist Comp Sci instructor, when our entire class was engineers who would need to use FORTRAN for classes. He was shocked a couple years later when he came up for tenure and we all said, "No way."

 

 

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