Posted on 06/12/2021 9:01:32 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I never met anyone who’d coded in APL, but I read several articles in Byte Magazine around it and was very intrigued.
APL was the first language I learned to program in at a level greater than very simple loops like generating the Fibonacci series, etc. I used it a lot when I was in high school because I had access to computer time on a university-owned IBM 370 via an APL workspace. I soon lost interest in it though as more structured languages began to take over, and as BASIC began to be used to program laboratory computers for data collection, analysis, etc. This was in the early- to mid=70s time frame, around 50 years ago.
During the '80s I switched to assembler programming as I learned to use microprocessors and worked on a few microprocessor projects. I did a fairly involved one using the RCA 1802, and magnetic bubble memory.
I learned to program in Pascal for a job I had in the late '70s; was exposed to LISP in graduate school. I found LISP intriguing but very difficult to maintain. I used Forth once for an engineering (hardware) project, and I hated it. Awful.
I'd say this guy is out of his mind. Or is someone who knows little about statistics, e.g., how many tests for significance does R have vs. Python? Over 100 vs. two dozen or so for Python. Python is not a serious statistical tool. And R is going nowhere. Now if SAS, SPSS, etc. are ever made freely available, that could be a different story.
For me:
BASIC
6502 assembler
Forth
Pascal
FORTRAN
PL/1
COBOL
C
Perl
SQL
ASP.NET
I thought I was the only one that preferred Pascal.
Sadly. it dropped off of the map decades ago :p
See this page for why perl isn't really attractive to new programmers. The fact that the referenced perl script will actually work is proof enough that it was written by madmen.
No, you're not alone. I have (Delphi-compatible) Lazarus running on my laptops. I am a hammer waiting for a nail.
English will evolve. Read Beowulf in old English and you soon realise old English is basically German.
The English language is a creole that took bits and pieces of other languages.
It will evolve into Spanglish in the USA, and in to Hinglish, Singlish etc. Hopefully the future language will be a more precise language like Sanskrit or Latin.
"That's a joke son. A joke! Ya hear?"
Did you know that this forum was written in Perl?
Oops. How could I possibly have forgotten APL?
I helped doing a mod for a computer game several years ago.
I didn’t realize I was learning C+ and Visual Basic.
Newbie!
I use paper tape.
Commodore 64 Basic.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think JimRob wrote FR software with PERL
Viz. #45 & #49
* yeah I know but I see lots of folk saying it is a language so what the heck.
COBOL was way ahead of it's time and a highly under rated language.
I used to power up our department's Nova Computer - made by Data General Corp - each morning by using the switches on the panel. If a switch was up it was a 1; down was 0.
There was a boot program that was about 15 lines long and 8 bits wide that someone had printed out and taped on the front. (This is because "boot rom's" were either too expensive or hadn't been invented yet.)
So you set one row of 8 up/down switches to the starting address, which was always 00000000. The other row of switches was for the data. After setting all 8 bits, you hit a spring-loaded toggle switch to the right which dumped those 8 bits into location 0. And it had a really cool, very VERY modern feature whereby it would automatically take the next 8 bits you entered and put them in the current address plus 1 (00000001). So you didn't have to keep setting the address switches to 1, and then 2, ... etc, for each new line of the program as you entered it. Wow, is that a totally rad, time-saving convenience or WHAT?!?
Once you'd entered all 15 or so lines of the program, you'd insert a well-worn paper tape in the tape reader, and start the program you'd just entered at location 0 using the Run/Halt button.
The bitty 15 line program merely did a "read next 8 bits from the paper tape reader, store them in location X+Index, increment Index, repeat loop until end-of-tape condition, then jump to address X".
As I recall, the program on the paper tape contained mainly just H/W drivers for an 8" floppy drive and a Hazeltine 2000 terminal (monitor & keyboard in one package). After the drivers were loaded into the Nova, it would load yet more pieces of a rudimentary O/S off an 8" floppy, and then you could sit down at the Hazeltine, and - voila! - play blackjack or The Game of Life ("gliders" & "blinkers" & lots more) .... until someone showed up with real work to do.
Those were the days!
I used to wire panels for 407s, 514s,188s, etc., assembler on UNIVAC with Fastran II and RAMAC 305, assembler on B263 - later NEAT, Wordmark assembler on 1401. I’m not old, I’m ancient. All of the above by the age of 24. Did you ever work on clustered 370-165s and 168s? DEC VMS clustered 9886, 8666 (3) and 6860? Clustering winservers using nightwolf back in the early 90s along with tunneling access in the same period.
COBOL, Assembler and Fortran here.
All on 80 column punched cards.
Those Assembler decks of cards were huge.
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