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How Heraclitus would Design a Programming Language
CowboyRobot writes "Developer of Smalltalk Alan Kay has an interview on ACM Queue where he describes the history of computing and his approach to designing languages. Kay has an impressive resume (PARC, ARPAnet, Atari, Apple, Alan Turing Award winner) and has an endless supply of memorable quotes: 'Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term,' 'Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you're always going to get a pop culture,' 'most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training,' 'All creativity is an extended form of a joke,' and 'nobody really knows how to design a good language.'"
You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you're pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month "playing the stock market" but in reality you're only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn't been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be "The Asshole". Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
ou think you're so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your "loft apartment", which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns 'n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to "Steve" would be "pretty cool". When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don't know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you "run Unix" now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don't know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer he installed Linspire on your machine.
You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandella, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
You've been "into computers" for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as "a bit of a hacker". Wouldn't know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You've explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an "optimised floorplan". They've tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you've ignored them so far because you can't read those complicated regulatory documents.
Much like the Gentoy user but you'd also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You're not just building a house from matchsticks, you're planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You've cleared some land but don't know what to do next because you havn't read the books you've got, so you've posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It's been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.
Waka waka bang star tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang star equal at dollar under-score,
Percent star waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Pipes curly-bracket bang comma comma CRASH.
Also: Isn't it odd that perl is the one language that hardly ever makes it past the slashdot lameness filter?
~Wx
sig?
You have got it so backwards, I don't even know where to start! For starters, C++ is NOT older than C - it's C's f***ing descendant! C was invented in the 1980s by the Borland corporation (it was invented as Turbo C), which was competing with Microsoft's QBASIC. C++ was created by Microsoft as an attack on Borland - perhaps you've heard of Visual C++?? Have you *ever* heard of Turbo C++? But you probably haven't, cos you're such a screwed up newbie.
n -the-leg patent.
Oh, and BTW - an *operating system* in C? Jesus, where have you *BEEN*! Don't you know that almost all the OS's existing today - Windows, SCO/Linux, even MacOS - have been written in C?? And that's why there's so many bugs in all of them - because C is practically *impossible* to write good code in. That's why Apple is now switching over to Objective C, which is kinda like Apple C++. I've heard that Windows XP was written in Visual C++. And SCO/Linux was going to be ported to Java, until Microsoft paid Sun off to kill the deal and IBM sued SCO for violating their big-company-with-major-trademarks-shoots-itself-i
Thankfully, the field is being revolutionised by people like Richard Stallman, who wrote gcc (the GNU C compiler), gvim and gnome, among many other open source programs. Finally, an advanced programming language like Perl can be used FOR FREE. Without a shadow of a doubt, Perl is the language of the future, even though it's still pretty young and all.
(And no, HTML is NOT a language. Go a learn a REAL programming language like Javascript, n00b).