Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages

[Jacques Menu]

1€ question for the young : whom does EWD stand for, and did he bring to 
computer science?

JM

> Le 26 août 2015 à 13:12, David Kastrup <address@hidden> a écrit :
> 
> 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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