3 ms·

I still remember when I first read the first C implementation of this, which was IIRC by Mike Burrows. Apparently, back in the days, Mike had some sort of phil

I still remember when I first read the first C implementation of this, which was IIRC by Mike Burrows. Apparently, back in the days, Mike had some sort of philosophical opposition to indenting his C code. I was impressed he managed to write such a complex piece of code without ever indenting anything.

ignoramous 4y ago
> Apparently, back in the days, Mike had some sort of philosophical opposition to indenting his C code. That explains his aversion to Python back then: https://archive.is/OFmNT https://archive.is/OFmNT imo, Mike Burrows' impact on the industry rivals that of the Turing awardees. Ex A from 2008: https://archive.is/ZPd4f https://archive.is/ZPd4f
- chubot 4y ago
  Hm, it seems obvious that Guido and Python have more impact on the industry (and I'm aware of Burrows' antipathy toward Python, which was well known at Google. As far as I remember it was due to debugging a syntax error caused by indentation in SWIG/Python) JPL and Google were early Python users. Google's crawler and the home page started out in Python (trivia: the ancient asyncore stdlib module and its author played some role, as far as I remember) Pretty much all AI and self driving cars use Python, BitTorrent was written in Python, Python is embedded in GDB, embedded in huge commercial applications like Maya for visual effects, etc. I think Ethereum had an early Python implementation Python's design achieved Guy Steele's "growing a language" vision in his famous talk, i.e. using operator overloading to allow scientists to create their own lingua franca -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29171519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29171519 (i.e. the talk was about adding operator overloading to Java, as well "generics" and value types) Mike Burrows is a great (even legendary) programmer and computer scientist, but if you're talking about "impact on the industry", there are levels :) I have to say I'm a big Alta Vista fan though
- lokar 4y ago
  And a really nice person to work with
im3w1l 4y ago
It's absolutely fascinating how many people in computing have really fringe ideas and still manage to get stuff done.
zshrdlu 4y ago
> I was impressed he managed to write such a complex piece of code without ever indenting anything. I wonder if he'd enforce a 's/^\s*//g' pre-commit hook if you worked with him...

ignoramous 4y ago

> Apparently, back in the days, Mike had some sort of philosophical opposition to indenting his C code. That explains his aversion to Python back then: https://archive.is/OFmNT https://archive.is/OFmNT imo, Mike Burrows' impact on the industry rivals that of the Turing awardees. Ex A from 2008: https://archive.is/ZPd4f https://archive.is/ZPd4f

chubot 4y ago
Hm, it seems obvious that Guido and Python have more impact on the industry (and I'm aware of Burrows' antipathy toward Python, which was well known at Google. As far as I remember it was due to debugging a syntax error caused by indentation in SWIG/Python) JPL and Google were early Python users. Google's crawler and the home page started out in Python (trivia: the ancient asyncore stdlib module and its author played some role, as far as I remember) Pretty much all AI and self driving cars use Python, BitTorrent was written in Python, Python is embedded in GDB, embedded in huge commercial applications like Maya for visual effects, etc. I think Ethereum had an early Python implementation Python's design achieved Guy Steele's "growing a language" vision in his famous talk, i.e. using operator overloading to allow scientists to create their own lingua franca -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29171519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29171519 (i.e. the talk was about adding operator overloading to Java, as well "generics" and value types) Mike Burrows is a great (even legendary) programmer and computer scientist, but if you're talking about "impact on the industry", there are levels :) I have to say I'm a big Alta Vista fan though
lokar 4y ago
And a really nice person to work with

im3w1l 4y ago

It's absolutely fascinating how many people in computing have really fringe ideas and still manage to get stuff done.

zshrdlu 4y ago

> I was impressed he managed to write such a complex piece of code without ever indenting anything. I wonder if he'd enforce a 's/^\s*//g' pre-commit hook if you worked with him...