In my case, I was asked to help the Comptrollers (Air Force speak for accountants) to optimize the code because they were using an IBM emulator on a Honeywell 6800 and their APL programs were bogging down the entire system. Oh, what tangled web we create, when first we try to emulate - or, perhaps, there was another fine mess they got me into.
Ray Parks Consilient Heuristician/IDART Old-Timer V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder) JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder) On Jul 13, 2015, at 4:33 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: > I programmed in APL while at Xerox in the 70's. Although "dangerous" it was > really fast to program in, especially as a domain specific language, so to > speak. It got so that if you couldn't do a one-liner for anything you wanted > to do, you'd be disappointed! > > Interestingly enough, it was the Finance dept of Xerox that first started > using it, and then it leaked into the labs where it went viral. > > SmallTalk was sorta the same, really great but hard to deploy initially, but > really loved in the labs. > > -- Owen > > On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 3:19 PM, Parks, Raymond <rcpa...@sandia.gov> wrote: > It's analagous to pets - you raise them (sometimes) from bottle-feeding and > they live to old age - and they die long before you are ready. Sure, there > are the occasional turtles and parrots that outlive their owners - COBOL has > long outlived Grace Hopper - but most computer languages come and go within > their authors and certainly users professional lifetimes. Sometimes you > babysit somebody else's pet while they're on vacation or something - the > other thread on the cube comic points this out - only a few of us have ever > worked with SNOBOL (and we probably didn't like it that much). I started > with Algol, moved on to COBOL, assembled various flavours, did some Fortran > (various flavours), then CMS II (a regression), C, C++, Java (swore at > Grady), and then a succession of scripting languages (none of which have > stuck). My strangest language experience was A Programming Language (APL) - > oh the damage one can do in almost no code. > > Ray Parks > Consilient Heuristician/IDART Old-Timer > V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084 > NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov > SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder) > JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder) > > > > On Jul 11, 2015, at 8:41 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: > >> This is sorta sad: >> https://github.com/NetLogo/NetLogo/wiki/Applets >> Applets: They're dead Jim. >> >> Sad mainly from a history standpoint: Java built a really fascinating cross >> platform, VM based, language & libraries. >> >> JS is now the current winner. But then, there's Web Assembly which will >> provide a path for all languages to replace JS in the browser and in Node.js. >> >> Sigh. >> >> -- Owen >> >> ============================================================ >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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