3 ms·

I found that article to be great. The author does a good job of trying to understand what was going on in the 70's with programming languages. I have a small is

I found that article to be great. The author does a good job of trying to understand what was going on in the 70's with programming languages. I have a small issue with their use of "Fortran 70" rather than Fortran IV (or Fortran 4 as it was called) which was far and away more used, especially in university/scientific contexts. As I've told unbelieving students that I learned to program using a Teletype and line numbers were really really useful. Later I actually used an "editor" on a DEC Writer and it was even more convoluted. (it would print the line you were editing, down arrow would move to the next line, up arrow to the previous line, right arrow would print out the current line character by character and if you typed other characters they would either be inserted or replace characters depending on the mode.) I think a case insensitive python with group delimiters rather than using indentation for groups and a line terminator character would be a good replacement. The goal is to minimize the number of new things you have to learn to get going. Concepts like grouping and individual statements seem to "stick" better with students when they can easily express that with characters in the code. (my experience teaching people to program YMMV of course).

eszed 3y ago
I, an actual adult, would love a Python like that. It's not that I can't program in Python (or that I'm sloppy with indentation - quite the reverse, actually), but I find significant white-space really difficult to read, and harder to hold in my head. I'm not sure why that is!
- ikari_pl 3y ago
  It only used to be a progrem if you use more than one editor for your code. Set everything to 4 spaces and be merry! For where you have to put a newline and an indent, I tend to think of it like the mandatory "only good" formatting, which many languages suggest, or enforce, anyway. Maybe rather than "whitespace matters", we should see it more like "you gotta start an indented block after if condition:"
ikari_pl 3y ago
Thank you :-) The author, being born in 1987, while interested in how things came to be the way they are, only had an 8-bit and PCs, and needed to base it on some archive digging, and it was really satisfying. I have corrected the Fortran reference - was mislead by the "70", but it turns out it was more like a WIP standard that wasn't even in use until the end of the decade. Inserting on a DEC Writer must have been... not the most intuitive experience. I think inserting characters in the middle of the line wasn't practical on anything else than a screen, even if of an electronic typewriter? It's also a great point how case sensitivity may be confusing for beginners - it's the same word after all, isn't it?

eszed 3y ago

I, an actual adult, would love a Python like that. It's not that I can't program in Python (or that I'm sloppy with indentation - quite the reverse, actually), but I find significant white-space really difficult to read, and harder to hold in my head. I'm not sure why that is!

ikari_pl 3y ago
It only used to be a progrem if you use more than one editor for your code. Set everything to 4 spaces and be merry! For where you have to put a newline and an indent, I tend to think of it like the mandatory "only good" formatting, which many languages suggest, or enforce, anyway. Maybe rather than "whitespace matters", we should see it more like "you gotta start an indented block after if condition:"

ikari_pl 3y ago

Thank you :-) The author, being born in 1987, while interested in how things came to be the way they are, only had an 8-bit and PCs, and needed to base it on some archive digging, and it was really satisfying. I have corrected the Fortran reference - was mislead by the "70", but it turns out it was more like a WIP standard that wasn't even in use until the end of the decade. Inserting on a DEC Writer must have been... not the most intuitive experience. I think inserting characters in the middle of the line wasn't practical on anything else than a screen, even if of an electronic typewriter? It's also a great point how case sensitivity may be confusing for beginners - it's the same word after all, isn't it?