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From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton)
Subject: [COFF] What languges would you like to learn?
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2019 12:13:07 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAP2nic376F5m5vNVCR5vGOFAViK5cyfFM2ahmYmUZFinxAjz0A@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20191225173101.GA13390@tau1.ceti.pl>

Maybe this will be the year I finally learn Rust.  Like Larry if I am
feeling like using a compiled language, I reach for Go or C (probably in
that order these days), and my day job is mostly Python, which once you get
over the syntactic whitespace, really is pretty much just executable
pseudocode, which turns out to be rather nice.

FORTH is fun and everyone should learn enough of it to get the feel of a
stack-based language.  You can have most of the fun with a proper HP
calculator (I never owned a better calculator than the 28S).  Not sure how
relevant FORTH is anymore, but it makes a nice palate-cleanser.  Of course
if you turn the stack on its side you have a list, and writing in LISP
dialects is also fun.

This also may be the year I dust off and get good at IBM 370 assembler.
I've got a vanilla VM/370r6 and one with the SixPack and DIAG58 and all the
bells and whistles (including a screen editor not a million miles from good
old XEDIT) running under Hercules.  So it seems like taking a crack at
getting v7 for the 370 going is something I really should do.  And I talked
to someone--don't remember who without searching my email archives--about
bootstrapping from v7 to whatever the latest Research Unix we can find is.
That'd be cool too.

Adam

On Wed, Dec 25, 2019 at 10:31 AM Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 23, 2019 at 06:27:48PM -0500, Nemo Nusquam wrote:
> > A recent thread makes me wonder which languages would people like to
> > learn?  (I confess to trying, as Dave does, but time prevents
> > anything more that learing syntax and writing toy programmes.  One
> > must write something substantial -- not synonomous with large -- to
> > really learn a language.)
> >
> > Erlang, Smalltalk, Prolog, Haskell, and Scheme come to mind...
>
> I will swim upstream and say: if I had more free time, I would
> probably want to finish reading "The AWK Programming Language" by Aho,
> Kernighan snd Weinberger. The language is quite limited (as I have
> written in another email of mine) but I think it is grossly
> underappreciated and quite a few things can be squeezed out from it.
>
> After that, I could find myself some decent Forth introduction and
> finish reading that one, too.
>
> But if you have not had experience with Scheme yet, try it out. LISPs
> in general are worth learning, IMHO. And much more practical than what
> a popular opinion says.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Tomasz Rola
>
> --
> ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
> ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
> ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
> **                                                                 **
> ** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
>
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  reply	other threads:[~2019-12-25 19:13 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 36+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-12-23 23:27 cym224
2019-12-24  9:54 ` thomas.paulsen
2019-12-24 16:28 ` toby
2019-12-24 16:35   ` lm
2019-12-24 17:50     ` 
2019-12-24 18:04       ` lm
2019-12-25  3:34     ` dave
2019-12-25 16:02     ` cym224
2019-12-25 17:05     ` thomas.paulsen
2019-12-24 20:27 ` dave
2019-12-25 17:31 ` rtomek
2019-12-25 19:13   ` athornton [this message]
2019-12-26  0:23     ` me
2019-12-26  1:54       ` wobblygong
2019-12-26  3:44         ` dave
2019-12-26  4:00           ` lm
2019-12-26  5:43             ` wobblygong
2019-12-26 11:49               ` tih
2019-12-26 15:33                 ` lm
2019-12-26 16:34                 ` thomas.paulsen
2019-12-26 16:53                   ` lm
2019-12-27  3:00                 ` dave
2019-12-27  7:02                   ` thomas.paulsen
2019-12-26 17:57               ` bakul
2019-12-26 21:28                 ` davida
2019-12-26 21:37                   ` lm
2019-12-26 21:57                     ` sauer
2019-12-26 22:13                     ` 
2019-12-27  3:41                     ` bakul
2019-12-27  4:00                       ` lm
2019-12-27  4:28                         ` bakul
2019-12-26 22:16                   ` imp
2019-12-27  3:41                   ` bakul
2019-12-26 15:43         ` dfawcus+lists-coff
2019-12-27 17:46   ` cym224
2019-12-27 21:33     ` tih

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