Bro he’ll never die. Chomsky will never die too. I’m serious. If Chomsky ‘stops living in his body’ his ideas for linguistics (not his political shit-flinging) will still be alive. When Knuth dies his programs and his algorithms and his books (especially his books) will still be alive. This is true about every single scientist or scholar. I did not even know Dijkstra was dead! He died when I was 9! But I just found it out, even though I love his works with C.A.R. Hoare, especially “Structured Programming”. I just might write a simple guide on the Hoare triple! So no scientists never die. Ken Thompson won’t die either. Bro will live in shell forever.
I read through their engines. I think there’s 2? Their newest VM is really great. I learned a lot about interoperability from it. They have a whole protocol, using libffi. It’s called ParrotVM. Give it a look.
Yeah true that. However the blast radius of the first big mistake (the whole FORTRAN lexing problem which ignored spaces) was so large that it shaped history… I wonder how Backus felt! I do wish I’d had more important jobs. Despite loving web as a concept, and having indulged in it for the past 20 years — ever since I was 12, I have never really developed a web application because I’m scared of getting ‘pigeonholed’ into web. The one web job I had destroyed my life, no kidding. But right now, I switched from the software I gave you, into making something like Pandoc. I want it feed it a reStructuredText-like syntax and get back HTML, PDF, LaTeX, Postscript, SVG, DVI! All in one file (that’s the power of scripting, portability). I want to make a blog. Because the one time I had a blog people bullied me and told me why I’m putting stuff there I don’t know about. It was a blog about OpenGL and low-level graphics :(
Well I would not be dreaming of disrespecting the guy because he’s like years and years my senior :D (I’m 31). Back when I was a baby asshole on web, I used to disrespect elders. A lot. People who had years on me. I still disrespect their opinions. But I cannot help but wonder what they think of me now.
(mobile code is ‘network’ code, basically JavaScript – Tom’s work, I believe, is concerned with formal verification of web code – if you are a webdev, read it!)
I just learned about Perl mode in Ruby. You see I am writing a literate programming tool with Ruby and I initially started with AWK, but then I switched to Perl, then Ruby. I think Ruby is the ‘ultimate’ scripting tool! If Python is the modern Java, then Ruby is the modern Smalltalk! I’m really having fun with Ruby’s syntax. Here is what I have so far if you wanna have a look: https://pastebin.com/fHz3jP80
This is my first --serious-- project with Ruby. I got the syntax more-or-less understood. I am just testing things in irb and applying them.
This description of ‘Lisp with C semantics, and Perl convenience’ is why I believe Ruby is such a good language — for scripting at least.
Only a small porition is OCaml. I’m making a C compiler in it and it could come useful. Did you know creators of OCaml (at least LeRoy) have created an entirely-verified C compiler called CompCert? Yeah mechanically verified with Coq! Ocaml is currently the best language for making compilers. Seeing as it is functional and Church-Rossier confluence applies to its expressions because its got no statements, but it’s got classes too and inheritnce so you can do stuff like visitor patterns, which is impossible in pure functional languages like Haskell.
I’m definitely doing a Rust compiler, one day. Maybe a subset? I’ll use c9x.me’s QBE. The good thing about Rust is, it’s like a functional language, but it’s really an imperative language. As for memory safety, this is the part that I hate because I like to use my chunky pointers to assure safety. So most of the times I’ll end up using C for my systems programs. But I have written several Rust programs before.
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.
I learned most of these stuff (stuff as oblique as Martin Lohf’s System F, which most modern polymorphic types are derived from) on my own. I have ‘Handbook of Satisfiability’ put aside so I can learn how SAT/SMT solvers work. I need them for my electronics circuit simulator. Keep in mind that there are other NPSPACE and NPTIME solvers, for example, BDD solvers (Binary Decision Diagrams). BDD solvers are much easier if you wanna give it a try!
People who say “you don’t need college” are seriously missing out on key stuff that helps them understand their day-to-day tasks. Like, in my self-studies, I learned about some neat, oblique stuff. For example, I learned about dataflow languages and Lucid. I learned about Church-Rosser’s confluence. I learned about Curry-Howard Isomorphism. I learned about so many cool stuff!
I’m going back to college because college is cheap here, but I’m a 3rdie, college is cheap but even the cheapest college from the US or Europe is much better than “Payam Nur University” is it not? (That’s the college I’m going to, it’s state-funded studies for prisoners!)
Also, Americans will have a much easier time getting into an European university. You guys could try that. College is almost-free for me but you guys have access to much better technological foundations in Silicon Valley. Here, you have to include your own batteries. For example, to fund my college (not the tuition, but I have to live right, and my uncle is having a hard time supporting a dozen people, sanctions are getting rough) I’m going to open up a ‘keyboard workshop’. Like I make mechanical keyboards and send it to people.
So if you don’t wish/can’t study in college, there’s always self-study. This book began my journey, just like many others:
Introduction to the Theory of Computation, 3rd edition -- Michael Sipser
You also need to read papers. So here’s your first homework: Find this book on Google Scholar. You’d be needing it _a lot _!
It’s sort of a ‘meme’. Dip in. Self-learning is not ‘second bests’ of college students! Especially some shithole like mine. Imagine this, your computer is like a calculator. Use it to learn computation!
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
Well I remember most stuff most kids don’t remember. Does your avergage TikTok teenager remember actually having fun with a software that is not a game? I used to love messing around with ‘acquired’ versions of a lot of weird software. Kids these days gotta be super-weird to consider Blender a non-game software they’d like to mess with .Right?
btw when Knuth dies Professor DROFNATS gonna be sad :(