• 3 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: August 16th, 2024
  • SamiDena@programming.devOPtoProgramming@programming.dev•Interview with Larry Wall (of $Perl fame) -- The man who invented a universe and a culture "to reach a goal", as it is the mantra of "the hacker", to "do everything to reach a goal"
    2·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • SamiDena@programming.devOPtoProgramming@programming.dev•When you write an ugly program, you make Donald Knuth cry!
    1·
    3 months ago

    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

  • SamiDena@programming.devOPtoProgramming@programming.dev•When you write an ugly program, you make Donald Knuth cry!
    2·
    3 months ago

    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?