10 ms·
Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)
- osswid 11y agoDid something change recently with the HN ranking algorithm?
- dang 11y agoNo. Why do you ask?
- kristofferR 11y agoThings on the front page has way less votes and seems fresher (more quickly replaced) than before. There are multiple stories on the front page right now with less than 10 votes and only one story older than 9 hours.
- JonnieCache 11y agoThe voting behavior of the users varies with time of day and day of the week.
- dang 11y agoSome of that may be artifacts of the experiments we've been working on to make it easier for good stories to surface from /newest. If you're interested, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10376064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10376064 and the links there.
- nefitty 11y agoWell, that name probably didn't help much either.
- V-2 11y agoWhy? Honest question - a non-native speaker here. Does it have any hidden connotations, or just weird
- nefitty 11y ago"Jorf" is just an ugly word. It also evokes guttural body sounds like "barf" and "urgh", the kind someone makes when they're sick... It might be just from a native English speaker's perspective. I know English in general is not an appealing language to some ears from non-English speaking countries.
- V-2 11y agoThanks for shedding some light on it. Personally I quite like the sound of English (my native tongue being Polish), and "jorf" doesn't sound to me any worse than Jeff or Ralph :) but obviously I don't have the same sensitivity as native speakers.
- hobs 11y agoInteresting you say that, you may not know that Ralph is also slang for "to vomit". I don't think "to Jeff" is anything yet.
- V-2 11y agoHaha no I didn't. I just tried to think up an example of something phonetically similar but innocent, but there you go. Bad for Ralphs I guess. We've got an old idiom that subtitutes vomiting for "going to Riga" (the Latvian capital). Not really aimed against Latvians, it just plays on certain phonetic similarity of Ryga and "rzygać" (to puke). Different languages, same bag of tricks.
- Reason077 11y agoYeah. "Josephine’s Recipe Filer"? JORF?! It all just sounds so un-cool compared to "Perl" or "Python". Not being open-source wouldn't have helped either.
- tjr 11y agoMake it GPL, assign copyright to the FSF, and release it as GNU JORF. Sounds much better.
- cows_i_have 11y agoWhat a name right? Sounds like some weird kind of European ball game.
- stuaxo 11y agoI wonder if the author would release it to free software ? I'm sure the archive.org people would have a runnable version, and it could be distributed as a freedos package.
- V-2 11y agoI found this: ftp://ftp.chatnfiles.com/Simtel-CDroms/Simtel-for-Ms-Dos-march-97-2-of-2/disc2/misclang/00_index.htm Three Jorf archives there, binaries, manual etc. could be the whole thing for all I know. Not tested : )
- z3r0d4v3 11y agowhoa - ty 4 the link man, i just tested it and got ethically blewn away! screener: http://mnml.is/hn/jorf_on_war.png http://mnml.is/hn/jorf_on_war.png
- V-2 11y agoSo it works? Did you run any code? Jorf is about to witness its revival :)
- z3r0d4v3 11y agoi just extracted all the 3 zips into seperate dirs, the last contained a jorf.exe, which i started from a dosbox, spinned away flawless - have no idea about what's in what archive thou
- V-2 11y agoAnyway, it's interesting that he singled out nuclear weapons, but eg. landmines would be just fine
- neoeldex 11y agoI always figured landmines, and ammo are considered chemical weapons
- x5n1 11y agoborf? barf? can't think of many words ending in rf. bark? Barf Corf Curf Kerf Serf Surf Turf Zarf
- TeMPOraL 11y ago- "Please provide this gentleman with an example, Mr. Worf."
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- eru 11y agoMaulwurf.
- INTPenis 11y agoSerf would be a nice marketing word today I think, you could make a little picture that depicts the language as being in serfdom to the user. ;) Maybe I've had too much coffee, or not enough, I forget how that works. Whatever the case, I haven't drunk the exact right amount.
- icebraining 11y agohttps://www.serfdom.io/ https://www.serfdom.io/
- deleted 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mmahemoff 11y ago"If he started Jorf in 1987, that means he started it around the same time Perl 1.0, (and the syntax is much nicer ;-). He started it around the same time Guido started Python." This is quite interesting as it's not really clear a better syntax would automatically make it "win" over other languages, or even that it's a significant factor. Maybe a prerequisite in most cases, but I think here are a lot of other factors that can be more important: * Surrounding library and tooling and documentation * System requirements to comfortably run it * Initial community * Ability of the author to promote it * The nature of the early adopter individuals and companies (thought experiment: young Mark Zuckerberg sits down one night and proceeds to write thefacebook v0.0.0.0.1 in Perl, not PHP) "So, he became a suit ;-)" I saw the emoticon ... but CTO of a startup != suit in many cases
- hyperpallium 11y agoYes, but how do you get that library, tooling, documentation, initial community? Here, Google, Sun, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook(?), Mozilla have huge advantages, but for the individual, let's hope there's something more intrinsic than promotion ability! Syntax plays some role at that early stage, of attracting that initial community.
- tinco 11y agoIf you look him up on LinkedIn his profile picture isn't even in a suit, and in his job description under CEO/CTO it says "Chief Grunt" so it doesn't sound like he changed much at all. Apparently he's been the CEO/CTO of his company for as long as I've lived :) (also.. I hardly think Mark Zuckerberg was an early adopter of PHP, it had been a dominant web programming language for years and was already being widely regarded as a bad idea even though alternatives either were very early or made by awful companies (asp.net))
- laumars 11y ago> * The nature of the early adopter individuals and companies (thought experiment: young Mark Zuckerberg sits down one night and proceeds to write thefacebook v0.0.0.0.1 in Perl, not PHP) A couple of points: 01) PHP was already very well established when Zuckerberg wrote thefacebook. As was Perl, Python, ASP.NET, Cold Fusion, and a few Java solutions (such as Tomcat) too. While it feels like Facebook has been around since forever, it's actually quite a recent development relative to the age of the web. My point being that it wasn't Facebook that made PHP big. 10) You theorise about what might have happened if early prototypes of thefacebook written in Perl but that was actually the original language Zuckerberg favoured (eg https://gist.github.com/philfreo/7257723 https://gist.github.com/philfreo/7257723).
- beyondcompute 11y agoWow! Awesome story! And unfortunately yet another human-oriented tool which got dumped by the IT crowd in favor of obscurantist arcane machine-oriented engineerism-ridden hacks that break most of the possible principles of design and HCI and that are fantastically performant (i.e. have mind-boggling throughput) but often quite slow (i.e. take 300ms to react to key press and start for long seconds).
- V-2 11y agoIntrigued, I did some googling and found this God-forgotten FTP :) ftp://ftp.chatnfiles.com/Simtel-CDroms/Simtel-for-Ms-Dos-march-97-2-of-2/disc2/misclang/00_index.htm - jorf21_3.zip contains a manual :) Some interesting constructs / keywords, eg. For (Col = 0 thru 4) | Display B Music 5 times And some insights: The Windows culture is the culture of the WinProc; programs dominated by massive unstructured switch statements that handle esoteric message flags. As different products convert to Windows, they unquestioningly adopt the WinProc culture. BASIC, the language for the beginner, becomes Visual Basic, a language for precious few. C programs become full of global values. MS-Windows is so complicated that not even full time programmers can learn every command and every subsystem. This leaves no time for Windows programmers to learn about their customers. They are doomed to write programs that cannot meet the particular needs of these customer. The legacy of Windows threatens to be like the legacy of UNIX; expensive techies, weak programs. And design approaches: Memory Management Why is it my fault when my computer runs out of memory? It is not my memory, why is it my fault? Why do I have to "Open" a file just to read data from it? What exactly is "Opening"? Why can't I have two records available at the same time? The JORF language handles its own memory, and your reward is freedom to allocate large structures, arrays and text. The JORF memory can flush variables, methods, windows, internal values, and even the program stack to disk whenever memory gets scarce. Data is read from file when you reference it, so there is no need to "Read" it, and no difference between a "memory variable" and a field in a record.
- brusch64 11y agoRegarding the "Windows culture": WinProc programming was indeed pretty horrible. Didn't really program a lot in WinProc - but I've cut my teeth with MFC which was supposed to make it better. They broke down the big switch in the program and created classes (the c in MFC) and macros. The VCL of Borland was more abstracted, but we've used MFC. I am pretty happy that I don't have to do this any more. When I started with C# and Windows Forms it seemed like a revelation for me.
- dreen 11y agoLooks like he only has a short unshaven facial growth [1], that barely qualifies as a beard, which we all know are the true reason behind successful programming languages [2] [1] http://assets.bizjournals.com/portland/print-edition/p%2019%20Companion%20link*150.jpg?v=1 http://assets.bizjournals.com/portland/print-edition/p%2019%... [2] http://www.wired.com/2012/06/beard-gallery/ http://www.wired.com/2012/06/beard-gallery/
- z3r0d4v3 11y agohttp://mnml.is/hn/jorf_on_war.png http://mnml.is/hn/jorf_on_war.png
- atmosx 11y agointeresting license.
- z3r0d4v3 11y agoRESTRICTION ON THOSE WHO PROFIT BY ENCOURAGING WAR (MESSAGE 4 OF 4) No JORF Company product may be used by any individual or organization responsible for the production or storage of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. This product may not be used in any weapons system. If you work for such a company, you are free to use JORF company products at home for personal purposes, but you may not use this program for you employer's benefit. If not now, when? If not you, who? for those ASCII fetishists
- Johnny_Brahms 11y agoMeh, that is a bit like the iTunes EULA. You are not allowed to use it to make weapons of mass destruction. Maybe it is removed by now, but I found it hillarious back in the day.
- z3r0d4v3 11y agoyeah, let me just upload the last few songs - then my WMD is ready to rock that continent vs an IDE - kinda...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Johnny_Brahms 11y agoIt always struck me as kind of odd. This was before the iphone, but even counting iphone apps I haven't been able to come up with a way using itunes to deploy WMDs that isn't horribly contrived.
- jim_lawless 11y agoIn that same era, there were other proprietary programming languages just outside the mainstream that also attempted to abstract the low-level details of working with the Windows API. The Whitewater Group's Actor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_(programming_language) Liana ( the formatting for the article below renders strangely in my browser ): http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/the-liana-programming-language/184409088 http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/the-liana-programming-language/18...
- oconnor663 11y agoI feel like history has not been kind to languages that are tightly integrated with a GUI toolkit, unless that toolkit is HTML.
- jimbokun 11y agoObjective C? Not used much outside of AppKit/UIKit applications.
- dahart 11y agoQuestion- the article's premise seems to be that a language's popularity may be based on timing and language features, as opposed to language authors "selling" their language. How did Perl and Python gain "traction", if you will? Was it organic and due to people finding them and seeing they were better, or due more to Larry and Guido pushing the languages and getting the word out, or other factors, or a combination?
- ralsina 11y agoThanks to a reddit user, you can see JORF on the web now: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3okwt1/forgotten_language_jorf_could_have_been_python_or/cvy86tf https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3okwt1/forgott...