Umm... Your prof taught you Lisp, but you didn't find it interesting enough to actually implement your project in it?

Crap.. At Auburn, I had to leard ADA. Talk about useless... The professer even said it was a "useless, dead language and I don't even know why we teach it, other than we already have the books." Yikes. (Fortran was the intro class, btw.)

Yeah? At least you don't have to learn a language called ISETL (Interactive Set Language) just for discrete math. I'm glad a get to clutter my precious brain space with a language I'll use for 3 months of my life...

Good grief, that IS worthless ;8^)

So... adding my "history" :-)
I started programminig in MBasic with the "NCRgraf" graphics
library. The next step was x86 assembly written in "debug" and called from GWBasic.
Then I started doing Turbo Pascal.
The university introductory course was SIMULA.
And then some university courses involving C, 68k assembly and "ML" (Meta Language) as well as a lot of other projects in different programming languages.

Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)

I'd tend to argue that no language is worthless. First, a real programmer should be able to pick up a new language in a few days worth of study. Second, almost any language is bound to have some application worth learning. You might find in the future that some feature of a language you previously found obscure shines some light on a problem, and allows you to solve it in a more efficient manner.

Just my thoughts, though. You might find things to be different if pointed at Intercal or Brainfuck or Befunge.

Check out this site, it's about programing languages. Almost all of them are listed. Some are really amazing, check the one called brainf*ck! For each language a helloworld source is provided.
http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/HelloWorld.shtml

enjoy!

At Auburn, I had to leard ADA. Talk about useless

..unless you happen to be creating a bomb proof (pardon the pun) real time system for the military, in which case ADA is a) Useful and b) Extremely bloody lucrative! It was a compulsory module in my Real Time Systems degree, mainly because 25% of the graduates from that course went on to write nuclear bomb simulators and so forth for the MoD.

Other reasons for teaching ADA that your professor might have considered compelling include:

a) Demonstration of a P-Code compilation system
b) Extremely strongly typed syntax - I mean NO slacking off
c) Thoroughly defined concurrency model

Personally I hated it - too many words!

Rob

LOL

Don't you mean that you had to change cards?

I did, but that was nothing compared to three-pass assembler that used paper tape as intermediate storage (punched and read on AT&T KSR-33 teletype), or hand-assembling a bootstrap loader and entering it by means of front panel switches. All that on real-world computer (Nova3 by Data General) used in a physics laboratory, not a hoby project.

As for languages used in CS study, I think that one should used several, those best suited for topic at hand. So, perhaps Pascal for fundamental algorithms and data structures, Smalltalk for OO concepts, some Assembly and then C (or BCPL) for 'close to the metal (or, rather, silicon)' work, Lisp and Prolog for AI concepts, any combination of shell, Perl, Python etc for 'administrative' scripting etc. Then encourage students to glance over Ada, ML, certainly Java and C++, even (gasp) COBOL, Basic, FORTRAN or PL/I. CS study should focus on concepts, ideas and methodology, not languages. A graduate should be able to switch (and learn to use new) languages as easily as editors.

Once upon a time I briefly used symbolic math packages (Reduce and, I think, Macsima) consisting of several hundred thousands lines of Lisp.

Eeek - that site doesn't have entries that account for a number of year of my IT experience:

Ramis II - a semi-hierarchical DB
Mantis - a CICS/COBOL alternative for IBM mainframes
NatStar - a semi-OO language that generates C++
Forte - Java without the curly braces but built for distributed deployment

If there's something out there that fills a small niche and is no good to anyone after a few months I seem to get stuck with it!

hand-assembling a bootstrap loader and entering it by means of front panel switches

On the first computer my dad worked this was the first task each morning, enter the device driver for the paper tape streamer. Six toggle switches (the computer had a 6 bit word), a button to advance to the next memory location and an oscillascope to show you the contents of the current memory location.

Must have been fun:

- set the toggles
- advance to the next slot
- repeat several hundred times...

Once this was done you hit "run" and it loaded every thing else from paper tape.

[war stories]

A grizzled old veteran used to tell me of his time with a computer on which running the compiler was prohibitively expensive, so development was done by producing binary patches against the executable, and then modifying the source code so it would hopefully generate code that did what the patched binary did. As if that were not bad enough, the machine was actually so feeble that running the text editor was prohibitively expensive, so developers would delay changing the source until their fix was tested, and then often "forget". Not too much of this and they ended up with a product that bore no relationship to its own source code.

This allegedly went on into the 1980s...

Peter

A graduate should be able to switch (and learn
to use new) languages as easily as editors.

Careful...you're about to start WWIII again. Everyone knows that vi is the best.

Once upon a time I briefly used symbolic math packages (Reduce and, I think, Macsima) consisting of several hundred thousands lines of Lisp.

"Eternal Flame"
Parody of “God Lives on Terra” , by Julia Ecklar
Parody lyrics ©7/29/96 by Bob Kanefsky. All rights reserved.
This parody was sung by Julia Ecklar on Roundworm.

I was taught assembler in my second year of school.
It’s kinda like construction work — with a toothpick for a tool.
So when I made my senior year, I threw my code away,
And learned the way to program that I still prefer today.

Now, some folks on the Internet put their faith in C++.
They swear that it’s so powerful, it’s what God used for us.
And maybe it lets mortals dredge their objects from the C.
But I think that explains why only God can make a tree.

For God wrote in Lisp code
When he filled the leaves with green.
The fractal flowers and recursive roots:
The most lovely hack I’ve seen.
And when I ponder snowflakes, never finding two the same,
I know God likes a language with its own four-letter name.

Now, I’ve used a SUN under Unix, so I’ve seen what C can hold.
I’ve surfed for Perls, found what Fortran’s for, Got that Java stuff down cold.
Though the chance that I’d write COBOL code is a SNOBOL’s chance in Hell.
And I basically hate hieroglyphs, so I won’t use APL.

Now, God must know all these languages, and a few I haven’t named.
But the Lord made sure, when each sparrow falls, that its flesh will be reclaimed.
And the Lord could not count grains of sand with a 32-bit word.
Who knows where we would go to if Lisp weren’t what he preferred?

And God wrote in Lisp code
Every creature great and small.
Don’t search the disk drive for man.c,
When the listing’s on the wall.
And when I watch the lightning
Burn unbelievers to a crisp,
I know God had six days to work,
So he wrote it all in Lisp.

Yes, God had a deadline.
So he wrote it all in Lisp.

Everyone knows that vi is the best

Methinks you misspelt beast there...

M-x lock-and-load

/Michael

Good Gawd, are we a bunch of nerds or what... ;8^)

Real cute. The PowerBuilder hello world example was needlessly long, and could have been done much more succinctly. :-D

Calvin

You should contribute your 'Hello World!' in these - after all, Mantis and Forte are rather mainstream...

It's just not a very interesting or practical language.

really!? then i'd better get upstairs and warn the CEO that our products are largely based on uninteresting and impractical technology!

--dan.

Everyone knows that vi is the best.

Of course it is (and I mean it, I use mostly vim when on Windows), but a bit of exotics here and there keeps one in shape

You described it correctly, except that my Nova had 16-bit word and content was displayed by 16 lamps (tiny bulbs - it was before LEDs). Scope 'terminal' was something minicomputers of that time could not afford. But few hundred instructions for a papertape loader is much - my bootstrap had 20-30 16-bit words.

Which was that machine your dad worked on? 6 bit word could be something from Remington Rand (later Sperry, then Univac, then Unisys).

Hey, Dan, where do you work?

really!? then i'd better get upstairs and warn the CEO that our products are largely based on uninteresting and impractical technology!

It's better to find out the truth early, isn't it?

In reply to:

---

Umm... Your prof taught you Lisp, but you didn't find it interesting enough to actually implement your project in it?

---

No, more a case of I didn't find the project interesting enough to do. I figure by your final year of university, you'd be choosing projects that actually interest you. Not so in this class -- the prof (actually just a grad student -- lousy instructor, bet he gets tenure) made up the projects, and we all had to do the same thing -- part of a "robot" that could given a map, navigate around a "house", and given a set of instructions, pick up "objects" and "move them around". I had taken the AI course because I was interested in neural nets. Turned out the neural net section of the course consisted of about half a lecture. In retrospect, I'd rather have taken languages and compiler theory. :P

You're right. vi is the best, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be familiar with emacs, notepad, pico, etc.

Once, in a training class, one of my classmates asked the instructor where he could find a copy of emacs on the training system. The instructor told him that it wasn't available and that he should just use vi. The ``student'' then sat on his hands and refused to do anything until provided with an emacs binary. I hope that he was spending his own money, or, at least, got fired by whoever paid for the class.

The moral of that story isn't that emacs people are snobs, but that one should know how to get around in every common editor. I consider myself a vi expert (which means that I know more than 25% of its features ) but I'm also good enough to get around in emacs, and I know that pico will insert carriage returns when I haven't told it to.

touché!

--dan.

pico -w

Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)