Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)(web.mit.edu) |
Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)(web.mit.edu) |
"Real Programmers can write five-page-long DO loops without getting confused."
"Real Programmers don't need comments -- the code is obvious."
"If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing."
"At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying ``Poor George. And he almost had the sort routine working before the coronary.''
Absolute classic. The words to live by.
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/recovery.html
It's also included in the Unix Administration Horror Stories, which was posted here recently-ish. But it's more just tails of people screwing up in creative ways. http://www.yak.net/carmen/unix_horror_stories
I have to admit, however, that I never knew it was written in PASCAL. I think this is very cool.
Anybody knows some more serious piece from those times that would show the actual arguments of, say, PASCAL opponents?
Academics were big kahunas with unrestricted accounts on mainframes, everyone else got tiny tiny slices of time. How tiny? A trash 80 gave you more processing power than an student account on the VAX.
Academics thought PASCAL was the bees knees. Everyone else could see it was unusable for practical work.
By Brian Kernighan
This was written in 1981, so a lot changed after he wrote this.
"Real Commenters don't read the contents".
As a real thing written by a real person, not so much.
Key word in the url "humor"
(Note: it is a Windows-1292 document, correctly identified that way by a <meta> tag, which is incorrectly given a UTF-8 charset by a Content Type header. Therefore if the weird symbols are too distracting, you can save it to the hard drive and load it into a browser from there, and the symbols will resolve properly.)
It is worth reading for the line, "If you can't do it with a sword, do it with a fireball. If you can't do it with a fireball, it isn't worth doing."
you almost got me c, you almost, got me.
Our codebase is one of the cleanest I have worked with, and it compiles very fast. We are using freepascal, and even though I would not use it for my hobby projects (which I try to do mostly in scheme or factor) I would say it is one of the more pleasant languages I have worked in.
Age of Wonders was written with Delphi also. Great game.
I should be clear that I like Object Pascal. I just dislike the degree to which Delphi insists on holding your hand, and I hate the absurdly bloated code base for which that behavior is at least partly to blame.