Re:What languages changed the way you think about programming?
by wglb on Thursday April 23, 2015 @11:55PM
(#9431356)
Fortran II, which was my first language. Learned it in Union Station in Chicago, waiting for the train back to Montana at Christmas break in my Freshman year.
XPL, after my very contentious relationship with Fortran II developed, changed not only my thinking about programming, but pushed me into a career in Compilers.
Then Lisp, after a 40 year interval (introduced in a "survey" class in my senior year at NWU), came into full bloom as my tool for most everything these days.
And RPG III for a reflection on its ancestry of Plugboard machines (not meant in a disparaging way). But the truth is that was likely the only way that I would have come to appreciate COBOL.
Bliss 36 as a precursor, of sorts, to C, on a high-level language used to write said compiler in.
I had a rather ho-hum reaction to C, as all the work in in the Sigma5/RBM interrupt-rich environment made it hard to accept the compromises that were, and are, C.
But C was a lesson in engineering to me. Engineering, in my simple country boy definition, is finding the solution to a problem with 5 mutually exclusive constraints. Studying C carefully shows you those. Unless you have designed a language, you may not have access to the full appreciation of it.
Syclops (yes, that is the spelling--the company was named Sycor), the language that three of us designed and built a compiler for back in the 1970s. It was a very simple language, in the spirit of PL/M, but it was a lesson in the combinatorial potential lurking behind even a very simple language. Three of us were a bit clueless that you couldn't build a compiler in a year, but we ended up doing it. And one of us was a student of Ullman; wrote a paper on a particular aspect of error recovery for LALR parser. Targeting the 8085, no less.
The PDP-10 assembler language for unmatched beauty and power in an assembler. 8086 is not very pretty in comparison.
Smalltalk, which taught me that with a good development environment, you can feel drained after putting in 8 hours of programming, because you are not waiting around for any compile, ever. And that OO programming in other languages (C++, I am looking at you) is but a pale imitation.
Oh, and Forth, for a way to build astonishingly complex behavior with extremely simple hardware.
XPL, after my very contentious relationship with Fortran II developed, changed not only my thinking about programming, but pushed me into a career in Compilers.
Then Lisp, after a 40 year interval (introduced in a "survey" class in my senior year at NWU), came into full bloom as my tool for most everything these days.
And RPG III for a reflection on its ancestry of Plugboard machines (not meant in a disparaging way). But the truth is that was likely the only way that I would have come to appreciate COBOL.
Bliss 36 as a precursor, of sorts, to C, on a high-level language used to write said compiler in.
I had a rather ho-hum reaction to C, as all the work in in the Sigma5/RBM interrupt-rich environment made it hard to accept the compromises that were, and are, C.
But C was a lesson in engineering to me. Engineering, in my simple country boy definition, is finding the solution to a problem with 5 mutually exclusive constraints. Studying C carefully shows you those. Unless you have designed a language, you may not have access to the full appreciation of it.
Syclops (yes, that is the spelling--the company was named Sycor), the language that three of us designed and built a compiler for back in the 1970s. It was a very simple language, in the spirit of PL/M, but it was a lesson in the combinatorial potential lurking behind even a very simple language. Three of us were a bit clueless that you couldn't build a compiler in a year, but we ended up doing it. And one of us was a student of Ullman; wrote a paper on a particular aspect of error recovery for LALR parser. Targeting the 8085, no less.
The PDP-10 assembler language for unmatched beauty and power in an assembler. 8086 is not very pretty in comparison.
Smalltalk, which taught me that with a good development environment, you can feel drained after putting in 8 hours of programming, because you are not waiting around for any compile, ever. And that OO programming in other languages (C++, I am looking at you) is but a pale imitation.
Oh, and Forth, for a way to build astonishingly complex behavior with extremely simple hardware.
Edit--typos