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Guido van Rossum: Before Python
- breck 15y ago> "But punch cards are the reason that some software still limits you (or just defaults) to 80 characters per line." Neat. I had always wondered about this.
- seiji 15y agoVisually: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_per_line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_per_line
- derleth 15y agoThere were multiple punch card sizes and formats; some were as small as 45 and some as large as 96 columns. Eighty does seem to be the one everyone remembers.
- kapranoff 15y agoActually, that's debatable. First, most 80 columns cards had the last 8 columns ignored (or used for metadata). Second, it is much more probable that 80 columns limit comes from 80x25 text resolution of EGA/VGA displays.
- bdesimone 15y agoGuido punctuates with more emoticons than a 14 year old girl. :)
- hardy263 15y agoI almost laughed out loud at the part "Have you ever invented a programming language? :-)" Off topic: It annoys me when people go "Oh you don't know this person? But they're so famous!" because not everyone knows all the famous people in every field.
- middus 15y agoAnd his use of parentheses is different than I expected: (blabla :-) vs (blabla :-))
- bdesimone 15y ago<insert lisp joke here>
- kirubakaran 15y ago(cons "lisp joke" here)
- jedi_stannis 15y agoRelevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/541/ http://xkcd.com/541/
- CrazedGeek 15y agoI usually do the second way, but put a space between the emoticon and parenthesis (like so :) )
- lucian1900 15y agoTo me, he always seemed to be a very jolly person. After seeing and hearing him talk, I'm not very surprised by a lot of emoticons.
- abecedarius 15y ago"Pascal really had only one new feature compared to Algol-60, pointers." -- Well, records were pretty significant too.
- 16s 15y agoI find these old computing stories fascinating. All programming luminaries should consider putting their history into books for us normal nerds to read ;)
- erikpukinskis 15y agoIt's amazing how many programmers think that programming is going to look roughly the same 50 years from now. They imagine the transition from punch cards to text files was a one time thing... That from here on out it's just going to be more and more refined text languages. I think history repeating itself, and programming becoming unrecognizably different, is much more likely. But I've also come to terms that those who lack the imagination to start picturing such things aren't going to believe it until after it happens.
- bergie 15y agoI'm actually looking at taking programming beyond text by moving the control logic to graphs. The idea is based on the concept of Flow-Based Programming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming It might be a misstep, as graphical programming has been tried before without much success. But I like the concept, and maybe new tools like multi-touch tablets finally make it viable.
- calibraxis 15y agoFlow-based programming is definitely something I'm (and some people I know) looking at. The coordination language idea is worthwhile for language-independence. And functional languages with lazy sequences are very similar.
- kristianp 15y agoThen again, aircraft have looked pretty much the same for the last 50 years. Maybe programming isn't going to change as drastically as it has in the past, when more experimenting was taking place. (I'm saying this semi-tongue in cheek, who can predict these things, really).
- perfunctory 15y ago> I realized that a pointer was just an address. Then I finally understood them. This is quite interesting. It seems to be a universal pattern. Has anybody understood pointers without first understanding memory addressing?