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> would use the C preprocessor to create his own language and then write the implementation of his language in that self-defined language Yeah that sounds lik

> would use the C preprocessor to create his own language and then write the implementation of his language in that self-defined language Yeah that sounds like the easiest way to make your colleagues hate you I "love" how we had more languages in the 70s (usually created as a one-off project for people with not so much user friendliness in mind) think m4, awk, tcl, etc

na85 5y ago
Awk is actually great. M4 not so much. Some absolute lunatic solved this year's Advent of Code in m4; it was impressive.
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  Terraform module args used to be very limited, and I didn’t know how to generate JSON it would take instead of HCL, so I actually used m4 to avoid repeating every template n times. And now we are sad because of course Terraform has improved quite a bit.
  - na85 5y ago
    I used to contribute to an ultima online emulator and I definitely used awk to generate C# classes from a CSV file.
ThinBold 5y ago
I mean we do have a lot of (perhaps too many) markdown dialects today. Wikipedia, wordpress, github, stackexchange, you name it. Last time I was using a Q&A forum for calculus course, it uses $$ to start and close a MathJax div.
- fhars 5y ago
  Well, at least that is the obvious way to delimit a math div, isn't it?
- smcl 5y ago
  My fave is Jira, where they have one syntax when creating an issue and another for editing it
nine_k 5y ago
Would you consider doing string processing in C rather than in Awk or Tcl?
- jfk13 5y ago
  In FORTRAN, thank you. (It was a long time ago, and there was no C compiler on our IBM/370...)
- raverbashing 5y ago
  It is funny question because I think most languages get string processing right. Pascal gets it right. Except C.
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    But BSTR, too, is a C construct.
- anthk 5y ago
  TCL is basically THE string processing language... because everything is a string :p. For short scripts, awk is nice, but most people would use Python nowadays, and die hard Unix greybeards will use Perl or TCL depending on the mood.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Version 8.4 changed it a bit.
foxfluff 5y ago
> Yeah that sounds like the easiest way to make your colleagues hate you Well I'm not Whitney's colleague but I really like his code.
- smcl 5y ago
  What do you like about it? I don’t think it needs to be stated why the majority of people here probably hate it, but I am curious why anyone would actively like it. I can maybe see that there’s a sense of achievement in being able to grok a codebase that is often described as unreadable
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    It might be unreadable in the same sense as Chinese or Russian is to someone who hasn't learned to read it. Learn to read and it turns out not to be unreadable? I like it because it makes it easier for me to see the big picture. The forest and the mountain. It doesn't over-emphasize the bark on the trees; it doesn't drag on and make me scroll & jump through a maze of boring minute detail. At the same time, it doesn't actually bury and hide whatever detail there is; it's all there for when you need it. Whitney also generally simplifies things a lot and avoids tedious contortions others would make for portability or some theoretical conception of maintainability, readability, or vague "best practices". It's very straightforward and -- once you get past the Whitney vocabulary and general style -- there are no mountains of abstractions and layers you need to grok before you can work on the code. The biggest problem is that after getting used to that style, "normal" code starts to feel like kindergarten books with very simple sentences written in horse sized capital letters, a handful per page. Except that those letters are not used to write a short children's story, but a complex labyrinthine machine, and the over-emphasis on minute detail just obscures the complexity and you end up with cross cutting concerns spread over thousands of lines of code and many many files. It might look clean and readable on the surface, yet: there be dragons. And nobody wants to tame those dragons because there's so much code. And then I find myself sighing and asking: why on earth do we need an entire page for what would really amount to a line of code if we didn't insist on spelling everything out like it's babby's third program after hello world? It's just tedious. Whitney certainly writes his own sort of dragons, but it's easier to keep them all in your head. For example, the b compiler won't work out of the box on multiple platforms. I'm fairly confident I could port it without much effort, as long as the platform meets some basic requirements.

na85 5y ago

Awk is actually great. M4 not so much. Some absolute lunatic solved this year's Advent of Code in m4; it was impressive.

erik_seaberg 5y ago
Terraform module args used to be very limited, and I didn’t know how to generate JSON it would take instead of HCL, so I actually used m4 to avoid repeating every template n times. And now we are sad because of course Terraform has improved quite a bit.
- na85 5y ago
  I used to contribute to an ultima online emulator and I definitely used awk to generate C# classes from a CSV file.

ThinBold 5y ago

I mean we do have a lot of (perhaps too many) markdown dialects today. Wikipedia, wordpress, github, stackexchange, you name it. Last time I was using a Q&A forum for calculus course, it uses $$ to start and close a MathJax div.

fhars 5y ago
Well, at least that is the obvious way to delimit a math div, isn't it?
smcl 5y ago
My fave is Jira, where they have one syntax when creating an issue and another for editing it

nine_k 5y ago

Would you consider doing string processing in C rather than in Awk or Tcl?

jfk13 5y ago
In FORTRAN, thank you. (It was a long time ago, and there was no C compiler on our IBM/370...)
raverbashing 5y ago
It is funny question because I think most languages get string processing right. Pascal gets it right. Except C.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  But BSTR, too, is a C construct.
anthk 5y ago
TCL is basically THE string processing language... because everything is a string :p. For short scripts, awk is nice, but most people would use Python nowadays, and die hard Unix greybeards will use Perl or TCL depending on the mood.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Version 8.4 changed it a bit.

foxfluff 5y ago

> Yeah that sounds like the easiest way to make your colleagues hate you Well I'm not Whitney's colleague but I really like his code.

smcl 5y ago
What do you like about it? I don’t think it needs to be stated why the majority of people here probably hate it, but I am curious why anyone would actively like it. I can maybe see that there’s a sense of achievement in being able to grok a codebase that is often described as unreadable
- foxfluff 5y ago
  It might be unreadable in the same sense as Chinese or Russian is to someone who hasn't learned to read it. Learn to read and it turns out not to be unreadable? I like it because it makes it easier for me to see the big picture. The forest and the mountain. It doesn't over-emphasize the bark on the trees; it doesn't drag on and make me scroll & jump through a maze of boring minute detail. At the same time, it doesn't actually bury and hide whatever detail there is; it's all there for when you need it. Whitney also generally simplifies things a lot and avoids tedious contortions others would make for portability or some theoretical conception of maintainability, readability, or vague "best practices". It's very straightforward and -- once you get past the Whitney vocabulary and general style -- there are no mountains of abstractions and layers you need to grok before you can work on the code. The biggest problem is that after getting used to that style, "normal" code starts to feel like kindergarten books with very simple sentences written in horse sized capital letters, a handful per page. Except that those letters are not used to write a short children's story, but a complex labyrinthine machine, and the over-emphasis on minute detail just obscures the complexity and you end up with cross cutting concerns spread over thousands of lines of code and many many files. It might look clean and readable on the surface, yet: there be dragons. And nobody wants to tame those dragons because there's so much code. And then I find myself sighing and asking: why on earth do we need an entire page for what would really amount to a line of code if we didn't insist on spelling everything out like it's babby's third program after hello world? It's just tedious. Whitney certainly writes his own sort of dragons, but it's easier to keep them all in your head. For example, the b compiler won't work out of the box on multiple platforms. I'm fairly confident I could port it without much effort, as long as the platform meets some basic requirements.