btw when Knuth dies Professor DROFNATS gonna be sad :(

Bro he’ll never die. Chomsky will never die too. I’m serious. If Chomsky ‘stops living in his body’ his ideas for linguistics (not his political shit-flinging) will still be alive. When Knuth dies his programs and his algorithms and his books (especially his books) will still be alive. This is true about every single scientist or scholar. I did not even know Dijkstra was dead! He died when I was 9! But I just found it out, even though I love his works with C.A.R. Hoare, especially “Structured Programming”. I just might write a simple guide on the Hoare triple! So no scientists never die. Ken Thompson won’t die either. Bro will live in shell forever.

Which C compiler where you using???

I read through their engines. I think there’s 2? Their newest VM is really great. I learned a lot about interoperability from it. They have a whole protocol, using libffi. It’s called ParrotVM. Give it a look.

Yeah true that. However the blast radius of the first big mistake (the whole FORTRAN lexing problem which ignored spaces) was so large that it shaped history… I wonder how Backus felt! I do wish I’d had more important jobs. Despite loving web as a concept, and having indulged in it for the past 20 years — ever since I was 12, I have never really developed a web application because I’m scared of getting ‘pigeonholed’ into web. The one web job I had destroyed my life, no kidding. But right now, I switched from the software I gave you, into making something like Pandoc. I want it feed it a reStructuredText-like syntax and get back HTML, PDF, LaTeX, Postscript, SVG, DVI! All in one file (that’s the power of scripting, portability). I want to make a blog. Because the one time I had a blog people bullied me and told me why I’m putting stuff there I don’t know about. It was a blog about OpenGL and low-level graphics :(

Sorry I rambled. Thanks.

Well I would not be dreaming of disrespecting the guy because he’s like years and years my senior :D (I’m 31). Back when I was a baby asshole on web, I used to disrespect elders. A lot. People who had years on me. I still disrespect their opinions. But I cannot help but wonder what they think of me now.

Thanks.

No problem. “Imperative” means the kind of programming in C. ‘All commands’. With side-effects. Like a Von Neumann machine!

Yeah tom7 did a video on ‘badness’ in TeX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc I am learning ins-and-outs of TeX because I am implementing it in OCaml. btw, tom7 is a really stand-up fella. His thesis on “Modal types for Mobile Code” seems very interesting. He mentions it in the video. This is the thesis: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/People/tom7/papers/modal-types-for-mobile-code.pdf

(mobile code is ‘network’ code, basically JavaScript – Tom’s work, I believe, is concerned with formal verification of web code – if you are a webdev, read it!)

I just learned about Perl mode in Ruby. You see I am writing a literate programming tool with Ruby and I initially started with AWK, but then I switched to Perl, then Ruby. I think Ruby is the ‘ultimate’ scripting tool! If Python is the modern Java, then Ruby is the modern Smalltalk! I’m really having fun with Ruby’s syntax. Here is what I have so far if you wanna have a look: https://pastebin.com/fHz3jP80 This is my first --serious-- project with Ruby. I got the syntax more-or-less understood. I am just testing things in irb and applying them. This description of ‘Lisp with C semantics, and Perl convenience’ is why I believe Ruby is such a good language — for scripting at least.

Thanks.

I have not looked at METAFONT. I really wanna design a font with it one day. It was the first font creation software I hear.

Truly, truly literate text! :D

https://hkilter.com/images/f/f1/Programming-paradigms-for-dummies.pdf

Then read this in your spare time haha.

The paper (title on top-right) has more info. The image is kind gobbldy-gook.

It’s name of the paper. You can google-scholar it or just google-normal it with ext:pdf to gain access to it. It’s a very nice paper!

Wow that TLD! Perl has a rich history. Wall is the ‘computer scientist of people’. He’s a linguist by accreditation, but he’s got a lot of his credits with compsci stuff. He’s the guy who people like Alan Kay hate. Perl is a language that’s more ‘soul’ than it is ‘science’. But it excels at that. I love Perl, and Perl-derived languages like Ruby and Python – who try and Kay-ize Perl by making it closer to Smalltalk, and I think Python might have succeeded given how popular it is! So in one camp, we have ultra-scientfic-y languages like Haskell. Simon Peyton-Jones has a tutorial on writing a functional language in Haskell (well Miranda but you get it!). But there’s no tutorial on how to write Perl: You have to have soul, and 40 years of spare time, to re-create Perl. That’s why there’s not much of re-implementations. Perl is just Perl. One and only. Perl6 got away from it. Tried to ‘specify’. But if I wanted specs, I’d go to Scheme! When I want soul, I come to Perl.

Oh I’m just a poseur! As it is my understanding, Usenet was for ‘grownup people’ (like Larry Wall, check the interview with him I just posted!) and BBS was for ‘hacker scene kids’. I started using the internet in 2005 when I was 12 (I did use it sparingly before though) and back in 2005 the ‘web-ization of the internet’ was not as pronounced as it is now, but it was strong enough that I had issues understanding where the interned ends, and the web begins! But well, it’s in the name, is it not? :D

Well I remember most stuff most kids don’t remember. Does your avergage TikTok teenager remember actually having fun with a software that is not a game? I used to love messing around with ‘acquired’ versions of a lot of weird software. Kids these days gotta be super-weird to consider Blender a non-game software they’d like to mess with .Right?

Just remember that back when Knuth wrote this, there was no such thing as ‘scripting’. So if you don’t necessarily ‘program’ but ‘script’ a lot, that’s the same. With scripting, the cleverness is not in algorithms you use or stuff like that, it’s as you said, clever use of resources. I have a story to tell:

A few hours ago my brother showed me this guy on Twitter telling people that, he’s asked people to ‘partition an array of numbers and null on null’ (in JS) and he showed his original solution, which was an iterative solution, very non-functional in style, and I kinda don’t like code that is just “too” imperative you know? Then my brother showed me someone’s solution.

const arr = [21, 242, 1135, null, 1341, null, 2424, 11, 22, 444 ];
// solution
arr.join(',').split(',,').map(subarray => subarray.split(','))

Golfing like this is exactly what would make Knuth cry! I wish people understood that golfing is not very readable! But understanding why this happens is what makes you more endearing, to me at least! This happens because of Javascript’s orthogonality, a remnant of Smalltalk-80 being retrofitted into a prototype-based system! Also, this is because ECMA-262 has specified ‘join’ to ignore ‘null’. Because ‘null’ is not a prototype, it’s baked into the grammar! It has no way to respond to ‘join’ so it gets left out! This is because of how Smalltalk-80-based languages are just “always communicating”. “null” is part of grammar, it does not communicate, so it gets left out.

Now, knowing that, this code looks more beautiful right?

I don’t know how these fora work yet lol. I’m an old 31yo man. These fora are getting to complex. Back in my day we had bulletin board systems.

I always wonder why BBS systems were cut off from Lee’s URI vision. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/179606.179671

This is the original ‘web paper’. The authors might have dismissed BBS systems as too ‘toxic’? Not sure. Or maybe they did have an URI identifier, like HTTP’s is http:// and FTP’s is ftp://. Why could BBS not be ‘bbs://’.

I dunno. I did not make the web, I just cringe that Lee got knighted for what is essentially Englebert’s On-Line system re-packaged for the go-go nighties.