From: Lawrence Stewart <stewart@serissa.com>
To: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2018 18:00:38 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <DD36F8A9-8482-46D2-8E9A-A7E875A526B1@serissa.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABH=_VTOor-bjQx+92y3s9MXMSVhNzVPwEk93PFxoOAxQr6b9A@mail.gmail.com>
I’ve told this story before, but not here, I think.
Brian Reid talked me into teaching a programming language survey course at Stanford around 1983. There were programming assignments in Pascal, LISP, APL, and Snobol.
Being young and too clever, I rewrote the Snobol assignment to be matching lists of crossword puzzle solution words for across and down into a grid representing the board (X’s and O’s).
I seriously underestimated how hard this would be for new programmers, so my own solution turned out to be the second fastest.
The fastest Snobol solution was a thing that if you held it out at arms length, you would swear it was FORTRAN.
-L
> On 2018, Dec 3, at 5:24 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/3/18, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hrrumft. You can write bad code is *any* language. See the annual
>> obscure C prize.
>
> Someone once said that a good Fortran programmer can write Fortran in
> any programming language.
>
> -Paul W.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-12-03 23:01 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 23+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-12-02 22:17 Dave Horsfall
2018-12-02 22:34 ` Toby Thain
2018-12-03 1:32 ` Rob Pike
2018-12-03 4:11 ` Toby Thain
2018-12-03 4:27 ` Rob Pike
2018-12-03 13:10 ` John P. Linderman
2018-12-03 22:44 ` ron
2018-12-03 16:25 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-03 20:20 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-03 20:37 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-03 20:46 ` Hellwig Geisse
2018-12-03 22:24 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-03 23:00 ` Lawrence Stewart [this message]
2018-12-04 11:53 ` Tony Finch
2018-12-04 14:23 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-04 14:43 Noel Chiappa
2018-12-04 14:53 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-04 16:24 ` Tim Rylance
2018-12-04 16:53 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-04 17:46 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-04 20:59 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-05 17:49 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-04 15:18 ` Toby Thain
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