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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.
In general, C is a really bad language for networking. It's passable for local stuff, but practically anything else? No.
PET BASIC rulez.
Wow, have you seen this?
ROLLING STONE ยท 7 DECEMBER 1972
Re: Wow, have you seen this?
Back in the very early 80s I was given a copy of Personal Dynamic Media, an in-house PARC book that explained Alan Kay's vision in detail, and had pictures of the Dynabook mock-ups that eerily prefigured laptops. I posted a scan of the mockup on Contra in my March 8, 2006 entry:
http://www.duntemann.com/march2006.h
Xerox was famous for having great ideas and then being totally incapable of monetizing them, and the reason was nothing more than incompetent management. When I left Xerox, that was about 40% of the reason; the other 60% was the huge raise that Ziff-Davis offered me to move into technical publishing. Egad, had Xerox been better managed I might still be there.
Re: Wow, have you seen this?
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~noah/nmr/book_sampl
I have never seen a posting of the full book, which is 75 pages long and was published in 1976. I don't think it was ever distributed outside of Xerox.
(Anonymous)
re: A Failure of Sarcasm
Jim Dodd
(Anonymous)
Re: A Failure of Sarcasm
And I also meant to say, "During this time Pascal pretty easily became Object Pascal..."
Unfortunately, these kinds of mistakes keep showing up in my code, too - both in C-like languages and Pascal.
Jim Dodd
(Anonymous)
my own kiddie language
A friend of mine, who I think you may know as well, Jack Crenshaw, told me a couple of years ago that after using C++ for 20+ years, he still didn't comprehend all the ways of using const in that language. Jack's an awfully bright guy, and that's an appalling criticism to level at any language, that something as close to the core as const could remain such a puzzle.
OTOH, it may have to do with the fact that since C and C++ have traditionally been supported(?) by perfectly horrible documentation, the only real path to understanding has always been through experimentation.
Contrast that with the perfect clarity of the Pascal "railroad track" diagrams.
You can pry my kiddie language tools from my cold dead fingers!
Bill Meyer
(Anonymous)
Re: my own kiddie language
CodeGear exaudi vocem meam...
You know, I just can't be bothered using anything else, if a programming language is poorly designed, and makes life difficult in stupid ways.
So that makes me Delphi bigot for life, too.
+W+
Here you go.
http://community.livejournal.com/vintag
I'm slightly surprised to not see you in that community - though come to think on it, I'm sure you have better things to do...