SciFi history?

[Greg Anos]

Just got off a thread on another site talking about new programming languages. It's amazing how much object oriented coding concepts warp programmers minds.

All those people who had slide rules in the day would kill for all the wasted cycles...

[Worldwalker]

My mind was warped long before I ever touched a computer.

My first programming language was FORTRAN IV, and I've been accused of writing FORTRAN programs in every language I touch, including assembler. All I can say in my own defense is there are times when a 3-value IF is exactly what you need, and I'm sad that the languages I code in nowadays lack them.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Just got off a thread on another site talking about new programming languages. It's amazing how much object oriented coding concepts warp programmers minds.

Which ones? I'm fond of some of the "write only" languages, like Brainf*ck and Whitespace.
______
Dennis

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Which ones? I'm fond of some of the "write only" languages, like Brainf*ck and Whitespace.
______
Dennis

All of them. They're so machine inefficient. I get so tired of the "throw some more hardware at it, hardware's cheap" attitude.

Some of those same people then tell me how bad greenhouse warming is, while requiring honkin' big server farms to handle their wildly inefficient coding languages...

(I'll go quietly, officer.)

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

All of them. They're so machine inefficient. I get so tired of the "throw some more hardware at it, hardware's cheap" attitude.

The problem is, hardware is cheap. The scarce resource is developer time, especially with ever shortening release cycles.

It's simply not possible to handle the demand for applications in Assembler. And few of the object oriented languages you rail about will see widespread adoption. They are experiments, designed to address specific problem domains. A few may see wider adoption if they address a big enough problem set in a better way than existing languages.

Some of them may not be as inefficient as you think.

Some of those same people then tell me how bad greenhouse warming is, while requiring honkin' big server farms to handle their wildly inefficient coding languages...

(I'll go quietly, officer.)

That's self correcting, as power requirements are an increasing concern. Not just the power to run the servers, but the power to drive the A/C all of those boxes generating heat require. Reducing power consumption is a major industry goal.

And you would see the same growth of demand and big honking server farms no matter what language everyone coded in. There is simply an almost insatiable demand for new applications and machines to run them.
______
Dennis

[kacir]

Originally Posted by nyrath

There are circular slide rules for sale here
http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/circular.html

Holy $DEITY!
This is some site. Pure, hardcore, slide rule porn ;-). They even have all the slide rule models I own. Unfortunately they obviously sell rules to collectors, with appropriate [collector] prices.
Now I have to make my own circular slide rule, just to satisfy my craving. There is no way I could spend $250 of my fun budget on a really nice circular slide rule. You could buy a couple of refurbished e-ink readers for that price! So I will have to write some scripts in AutoLISP to draw nice circular logarithmic scale for me in AutoCAD. By the way, AutoLISP uses Reverse Polish Notation as its basic syntax. And *lots* or parenthesis.

By the way, why are all the "western" slide rule scales labeled by illogical and cryptic markings like C, D, A, B, S, S-T, instead of x, x, x^2, x^2, sin(x) that every technician out there would recognize without referring to the manual?

[mike_bike_kite]

Originally Posted by kacir

"Multiplying magnification - 17 x 25 in my head"
"17 x 25 ?!? Your classmates are willing to use a calculator to multiply by 10."

I just bought a slide rule of the internet to show to my kids. I'd just read this thread so I used your 17 x 25 as an example. My son looked on while I carefully adjusted the bars to show him how clever it all was. Sadly he'd worked out the answer in his head before I'd managed to get the result. He's 13 - I suppose there's some hope left He was interested in the slide ruler for about 2 minutes though.

Originally Posted by kacir

Holy $DEITY!
By the way, AutoLISP uses Reverse Polish Notation as its basic syntax. And *lots* or parenthesis.

The idea of RPN is that you don't need parenthesis however LISP is famous for requiring thousands of the damn things - what gives?

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

All I can say in my own defense is there are times when a 3-value IF is exactly what you need, and I'm sad that the languages I code in nowadays lack them.

The database language SQL has a null value which makes all comparisons more difficult. Effectively it means that any test can be true, false or unknown. This little feature is probably responsible for more database bugs than anything else!

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

All of them. They're so machine inefficient. I get so tired of the "throw some more hardware at it, hardware's cheap" attitude.

Modern languages like Java are highly optimised and I find I can write board games like Checkers, Connect 4 or Othello and performance is never a problem - hell you can even write arcade programs in it. No doubt Fortran might be a little quicker but then I also have to factor in the time it takes me to write the programs. I'm not even sure if you can get assemblers these days for computers - I assume that C is the lowest language you could use.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Which ones? I'm fond of some of the "write only" languages, like Brainf*ck and Whitespace.

I thought whitespace was very clever. I've written a few small languages myself and just wish I had that idea

[kacir]

Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite

I used your 17 x 25 as an example. My son looked on while I carefully adjusted the bars to show him how clever it all was. Sadly he'd worked out the answer in his head before I'd managed to get the result. He's 13 - I suppose there's some hope left

Next time, if you get another chance ;-), use something like 1.37*pi*7.15/sqrt(20) (after demonstrating 2*3 and 7*8 to show the principle)

Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite

The idea of RPN is that you don't need parenthesis however LISP is famous for requiring thousands of the damn things - what gives?

Well, it is difficult to explain in a few lines, but in Lisp EVERYTHING is either a list or an atom. A list consists of atoms or other lists. Even the program listing is one top level list, containing other lists or atoms. List (or an atom, that can be a value, variable or a keyword) is the only thing that LISP can process. So the program written in LISP can be used to modify itself. Or you can build a list into variable and then execute it as a "function".
Parentheses (together with the necessary whitespaces separating atoms) are the only thing that determine the structure of LISP program.
Lisp is beautiful language. Very simple, very capable, the interpreter can be written with absolute minimum of code. This is why Lisp and its descendants (very often carefully disguised, so it is not obvious that "gee, this is that scary Lisp") are so popular as an embedded language for many systems.

(+ 1 2) gives answer 3
(* (+ 1 2) 4) gives answer 12
On an RPN calculator you would enter something 4 shift 2 shift 1 + *
But depending on the depth of the stack you do need to use parenthesis if the level of the deepest nested parenthesis is high enough.

For better example have a look at this Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%2...ge%29#Examples

When you write a program in AutoLisp and you want to prevent other people from reading the program you simply strip all the CR/LF characters (make it one long line), replace tabs (used for formatting) with spaces and then replace every occurrence of more than one consecutive space with one space. When you replace all the variable names with some A1, A1, A3, B1 meaningless names, it is guaranteed that nobody will be able to understand your program without LOTS of effort, especially when the program is long ;-)

so a nicely formatted

 (defun factorial (n)
   (if (<= n 1)
       1
       (* n (factorial (- n 1)))
    )
)

becomes

 (defun factorial (n) (if (<= n 1) 1 (* n (factorial (- n 1)))))

Now imagine that you are a programmer in the early stone age of programming and you use very simple editor without parenthesis matching function and you need to make sense of the VERY SHORT and simple example above ;-)

By the way, do you know the GNU Emacs text editor?
Do you know it has absolutely magnificent built-in RPN calculator that can find root of the equation of the n-th power, solve system of n non-linear equation with m variables in symbolic notation and do other unbelievable things?

[Worldwalker]

Emacs has everything. It's just that you have to sit on a mountaintop wearing nothing but a loincloth and eating lychees for a year before you can actually use it all.

[mike_bike_kite]

Originally Posted by kacir

By the way, do you know the GNU Emacs text editor?

Emacs is a bit flash for me - I've yet to move on from VI.
PS thanks for the Lisp intro.

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

It has nothing to do with being a pretentious snob. "SciFi" was the term used by outsiders for years to belittle the literature we enjoyed.

Strange-the terms *I* remember used to belittle the stories I enjoyed 50 years ago were 'trash', 'escapist', and 'science fiction'. I don't recall hearing SciFi used at all until the 80's, when science fiction started becoming popular. (That's when all us long-time readers started turning into pretentious snobs because we'd recognized the worth of thinking about the future years before.)

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite

The idea of RPN is that you don't need parenthesis however LISP is famous for requiring thousands of the damn things - what gives?

LISP stands for Lots of Insignificant Silly Parenthesis

Actually LISP stands for List Processor. Everything in LISP is a list. Even your program. And lists are enclosed in parenthesis.

[nyrath]

Emacs is not a text editor, it's a way of life.

It is astonishing all the weird add-on features that have been bolted on to it.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite

Emacs is a bit flash for me - I've yet to move on from VI.

Well, to be honest, I myself am Vim user, but I do use XEmacs very occasionally when I need to use its calc mode.
I was trying to learn XEmacs for several years and I organized a show-off with our resident Vim guru. I wanted to persuade him that XEmacs has more features [important to us, that is] than Vim. The show-off ended with me installing the Vim and never looking back ;-)
In a week I was more efficient doing things I need to do -- mostly Regular expression magic -- in Vim than I ever was using [GNU|X]Emacs.
I can take a freshly compiled Vim with default options and configure it exactly to my liking in 10 minutes. My dotemacs file had several kilobytes collected all over the net and I was still dissatisfied with its behavior.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Emacs has everything. It's just that you have to sit on a mountaintop wearing nothing but a loincloth and eating lychees for a year before you can actually use it at all.

I have corrected your post for you ;-)