3 ms·
It's supertempting to remember my path: 1. Basic on ZX Spectrum around 5-6 years old. Draw circle and a box and a triangle and... Look ma, a rocket! 2. Pascal
by vkazanov 2y ago
It's supertempting to remember my path:
1. Basic on ZX Spectrum around 5-6 years old. Draw circle and a box and a triangle and... Look ma, a rocket!
2. Pascal around 10-12. I can write a loop! and a function. But anything longer than 100 lines doesn't work for some reason. C is also cool but what are pointers?
3. PHP around 14-15. The Internet is easy!
4. Perl around the same time. I can add 5 to "six" and get "5six". Crazy stuff.
5. C around 16-17. Real stuff for real programmers. Still didn't understand pointers. Why can't it be more like Pascal?!
6. C++ around 18-19. I can do ANYTHING. Especially UIs in Qt. UI is easy! Now, let's make a Wolf3d clone...
7. Common Lisp + Emacs Lisp around 20. No compilation?! REPLs? What are atoms? Cons cells? Live redefinition of everything? A macro? A program image?
8. Python around 22. Ok, so languages can be readable.
9, 10, 11, ... StandardML for beautiful types and compiler writing, vanilla C and x86 assembly/architecture the deep way, back to Lisps for quick personal development...
Looking back, it's Lisps and vanilla C that sticked.
- WillAdams 2y agoIf you like C and Lisp (no Smalltalk experience?) did you ever have occasion to try Objective-C?
- vkazanov 2y agoNo Objective-C for me. I was always living in the Linux/x86 world as long as I remember. Isn't it like C with dynamic dispatch bolted on..? As strange as it may sound, I do know quite a lot about Smalltalk implementation details without ever using the language. Self (a Smalltalk dialect) papers were big in the jit compiler writer community in late 90s and early 2000s. A couple of classic general programming books used Smalltalk in examples.