Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages (was: Way to flatten nested \include's?)
On Tue, 25 Aug 2015 18:41:54 +0200 Jacques Menu wrote: > In the APL course I took years ago, the teacher said: « Exercice for the > next two weeks : find out what this sample program (25 symbols > altogether) does. A guy says two weeks later: « It does this and that… > but it took me two and a half hours to find out! » And teacher answers: « > Well, it took me two hours to write! » I recall that crucial to APL was its interactive environment. We had dedicated ttys with APL keys. Program development was adding one symbol at a time, trying what happened. Repeat until the program was finished. For real programming we wrote Algol on punch tapes, later punch cards. Turnaround time was one day, so you wrote the program, printed it, checked manually, proved its correctness (I was educated by EWD) and then delivered it at the computer department. APL wouldn't have stand a chance in that environment. I did like the language, in a peculiar way. -- Johan ___ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages (was: Way to flatten nested \include's?)
Hello Michæl, In the APL course I took years ago, the teacher said: « Exercice for the next two weeks : find out what this sample program (25 symbols altogether) does. A guy says two weeks later: « It does this and that… but it took me two and a half hours to find out! » And teacher answers: « Well, it took me two hours to write! » In a review on languages in the Communications of the ACM a long time ago, each language was described by a caption and a short paragraph. Sample captions: APL : I can read hieroglyphs too. Prolog : If Prolog is the answer, then what was the question? (Don’t misunderstand me though, I loved this language…). JM > Le 25 août 2015 à 01:37, Michael Gerdau a écrit : > >> While guile is aimed at being an extension language, don't forget that >> Scheme was taught at MIT for many, many years as the finest language to >> give students a deep insight into computing and computer science (refer >> SICP). [Sadly, they now teach Python instead. Real world practicality >> defeated beauty, insight, and elegance. :-(] > > Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.. > > Anybody remembering APL ? > > THAT is a beautiful language and most likely totally unuseable for the > vast majority of today's aspiring programmers :) > > Kind regards, > Michael > -- > Michael Gerdau email: m...@qata.de > GPG-keys available on request or at public > keyserver___ > lilypond-user mailing list > lilypond-user@gnu.org > https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user ___ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages (was: Way to flatten nested \include's?)
Greetings Michael, I used to use APL! Truly wonderful. As to beauty, while subjective, amongst mathematicians at least there is a shared sense of the beautiful, and not purely personal taste. Scheme has the elegance mathematicians and computer scientists perceive. Nobody could say Python is _beautiful_. [I use Python, so I am not just bashing it.] Andrew On 25/08/2015 09:37, "Michael Gerdau" wrote: > >Anybody remembering APL ? ___ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
OT: Beauty of programming languages (was: Way to flatten nested \include's?)
> While guile is aimed at being an extension language, don't forget that > Scheme was taught at MIT for many, many years as the finest language to > give students a deep insight into computing and computer science (refer > SICP). [Sadly, they now teach Python instead. Real world practicality > defeated beauty, insight, and elegance. :-(] Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.. Anybody remembering APL ? THAT is a beautiful language and most likely totally unuseable for the vast majority of today's aspiring programmers :) Kind regards, Michael -- Michael Gerdau email: m...@qata.de GPG-keys available on request or at public keyserver signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
