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Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages


From: David Kastrup
Subject: Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 13:12:36 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/25.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Johan Vromans <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, 25 Aug 2015 18:41:54 +0200
> Jacques Menu <address@hidden> 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,

You poor backwater guys.  Our card punchers printed a human-readable
version at the top of the card.  And since the line printers were under
the auspices of the system operators, one would not have wanted to wait
for the printouts of a listing.  I mean, in that case you'd have just
run the program instead and waited for the printouts of the run.  Or
more likely, the post-mortem-dump.

If you were lucky.

Still have a COMPASS manual around.  Put it up to Ebay at minimum
starting price, but no takers.

-- 
David Kastrup



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