Taking the bull by its horns [was background]

[dblack]

Hi --

Hope to see lots of others

Male, 48yo. Residence: New Jersey, USA.

Professionally trained cellist. BA in German and History of Art
(Yale, 1982). Ph.D. in Cinema Studies (New York University, 1989).
Member of the Dept. of Communication, Seton Hall University,
1992-2005.

Started programming in 1972: BASIC on PDP-8, assembler and dabbling in
misc. languages on PDP-10. Didn't do much from 1974-1990.
1990-present: at least some non-trivial stuff in x86 assembler, C,
(ba)sh, Perl, Elisp, SGML, DSSSL, XML, XSLT, (La)TeX, Ruby. Also bits
of Eiffel, Scheme; glances at Java, C++, and others. *nix (esp.
Linux) admin (for self and others) since 1993.


David

--
* Books:
RAILS ROUTING (new! http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321509242)
RUBY FOR RAILS (http://www.manning.com/black)
* Ruby/Rails training
& consulting: Ruby Power and Light, LLC (http://www.rubypal.com)

--
* Books:
RAILS ROUTING (new! http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321509242)
RUBY FOR RAILS (http://www.manning.com/black)
* Ruby/Rails training
& consulting: Ruby Power and Light, LLC (http://www.rubypal.com)

 

[F. Senault]

Le 18 juillet 2007 à 19:54, James Edward Gray II a écrit :

Wow Fred, you and I have a lot in common. I manage the Ruby Gateway,
as you know from providing us an account and putting up with my
bothersome emails,

I've had worse users. (The user is the enemy (tm).)

and I'm a big game nut.

Yup. I have lots of game DVDs lying around, so, when I'm not trying to
write mine, I've got something to keep myself occupied...

I'm always messing with some Ruby game, though most of them never
reach the sharing point.

Heh. s/ Ruby// in your sentence, and you are me. For a few dozen games
I've began since I touched a computer, I believe there's only one that
could be considered finished. (I was twelve, I had time ! Now, I try
to finish first the stuff I'm paid for, it has some nice points. Like
being actually paid.)

Any pointer to your game efforts?

Not yet. Soon !

(It will be a multi-player espionnage game, where the player has the
role of the head of the black-ops section of the local spy organization.
The main focus will revolve around the hiring, training and management
of the operatives...)

Fred

 

[James Edward Gray II]

Le 18 juillet 2007 =E0 19:54, James Edward Gray II a =E9crit :


Not yet. Soon !

(It will be a multi-player espionnage game, where the player has the
role of the head of the black-ops section of the local spy =20
organization.
The main focus will revolve around the hiring, training and management
of the operatives...)

Sounds great. Keep us posted!

James Edward Gray II=

 

[John W. Kennedy]

Actually, Delphi came out 12 years ago and Pascal was object oriented
before that.

No, Borland Turbo Pascal was. Borland Turbo Pascal != Pascal.

 

[Robert Dober]

Actually, Delphi came out 12 years ago and Pascal was object oriented
before that.

Just keeping the record straight.

Well no that I am done with the bookkeeping I can answer this

I was very greatfull to learn programming with Pascal, but nowadays it
seems a little bit out fashioned nevertheless, maybe one should learn
with Smalltalk nowadays, or even Ruby, a subset of Ruby to begin
with...

 

[Chad Perrin]

Actually, Delphi came out 12 years ago and Pascal was object oriented
before that.

Just keeping the record straight.

Technically, Object Pascal and certain other Pascal extensions are object
oriented, but plain-vanilla Pascal is not an OO language. There's still
a (not technically obsolete) Pascal language out there.

 

[Joel VanderWerf]

m39y
bg: Apple and VIC20 BASIC, 6502 Asm, Pascal, Logo, Forth, Lisp, C,
Fortran(*), VAX Asm, 68K Asm, Mathematica, Dylan, C++, SHIFT, Perl,
Ruby, MATLAB/Simulink
wk: wireless in vehicles; simulation; Ruby/C/MATLAB
location: SF, CA

(* - it was at SLAC, so maybe it was really MORTRAN)

 

[Morton Goldberg]

Dang ... someone beat me out for "doing it the longest". Not by
much,
though.

I also began programming on an IBM 650 (in 1958). Oh, the fond
memories: the glow of vacuum tubes, SOAP II [*], clearing card
jams from both ends of the reader/punch unit, the 25-millisecond
latency of drum memory
By 1961, I had already moved to the IBM 1620, a great improvement
over the 650. But my all-time favorite computer remains the DEC
PDP-11 (the original, not the VAX-11).
Regards, Morton
[*] an ancient assembly language -- nothing to do with XML messaging.

You missed the fun part -- it was an /optimizing/ assembler.

Optimizing, schmoptizing -- the only optimization it performed was to
take the drum latency into account when it assigned an instruction to
a location on the drum. You think computing the effect of drum
latency was the fun part? You sure have weird ideas of fun

SOAP = Semi-Optimizing Assembly Program (IIRC)

Regards, Morton

 

[John W. Kennedy]

On Jul 17, 2007, at 11:24 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
Dang ... someone beat me out for "doing it the longest". Not by much,
though.
I also began programming on an IBM 650 (in 1958). Oh, the fond
memories: the glow of vacuum tubes, SOAP II [*], clearing card jams
from both ends of the reader/punch unit, the 25-millisecond latency
of drum memory
By 1961, I had already moved to the IBM 1620, a great improvement
over the 650. But my all-time favorite computer remains the DEC
PDP-11 (the original, not the VAX-11).
Regards, Morton
[*] an ancient assembly language -- nothing to do with XML messaging.

You missed the fun part -- it was an /optimizing/ assembler.

Optimizing, schmoptizing -- the only optimization it performed was to
take the drum latency into account when it assigned an instruction to a
location on the drum. You think computing the effect of drum latency was
the fun part? You sure have weird ideas of fun

SOAP = Semi-Optimizing Assembly Program (IIRC)

Symbolic Optimizing", I rather think.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Stalin, but it's R4RS and seems to be more an academic research
project than anything that has an actual community around it. The USP
is that it does whole-program optimisation.

martin

I installed *every* Scheme that Gentoo has to offer this morning. That
gave me:

bigloo
chicken
drscheme
elk
gambit
gauche
guile
mit-scheme
scheme48
scm
stklos
tinyscheme

Sorry that Stalin isn't there. Well ... actually ... not really, given
that I'm a raging fan of Shostakovich.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

quoth the Robert Dober:


Well, I for one taught myself Lua. Couple things about it: 1. It is very fast.
In some trivial tests I have done it runs with roughly 50% the speed of C,
which means it edges out Perl as fastest "interpreted" language in my books.

A good tweaked Forth will tie or beat that record. I guess it depends on
how you define "interpreted" as to whether Forth is legal.

And 2. It uses 'silly' 1 based arrays (tables). See the other thread about
that

Forth uses politically correct 0-based arrays. Oh yeah ... it also
allows writing almost anywhere in memory.

 

[Morton Goldberg]

Symbolic Optimizing", I rather think.

I was depending on a nearly fifty-year old memory, but Google (whose
memory is better than mine tells me it's actually "Symbolic
Optimal Assembly Program".

Did you actually ever code in it?

Regards, Morton

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I was depending on a nearly fifty-year old memory, but Google (whose
memory is better than mine tells me it's actually "Symbolic Optimal
Assembly Program".

Did you actually ever code in it?

Regards, Morton

Yes ... it was Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program, and yes, I actually
wrote code in it.

We also had something called FORTRANSIT. It translated from FORTRAN to
something else (GAT? IT?) and then to assembler.

 

[Michael Ulm]

Hmmm ... AI but not Lisp?

I'm working on things like pattern recognition and document
classification. This involves lots of mathematics and number
crunching. Most software in this field is written in C-like
languages.

Btw, I tried learning Lisp several times, and never got the
hang of it. Although I like the pureness of concept, I just
can't write anything reasonably complex with it.

Regards,

Michael

 

[James Edward Gray II]

Btw, I tried learning Lisp several times, and never got the hang of
it. Although I like the pureness of concept, I just
can't write anything reasonably complex with it.

I'm exactly the same way. However, toying with Lisp did make me
appreciate s-expressions which I do now use quite a bit in other
programming.

James Edward Gray II

 

[Chad Perrin]

I'm exactly the same way. However, toying with Lisp did make me
appreciate s-expressions which I do now use quite a bit in other
programming.

S-expression syntax really does make for a great data format. I think
its strict prefix notation form is largely to "blame" for that fact.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

I was depending on a nearly fifty-year old memory, but Google (whose
memory is better than mine tells me it's actually "Symbolic Optimal
Assembly Program".

Did you actually ever code in it?

Never had a 650 to work on, but read the manual once, a long, long, long
time ago. My first programs were written for the 7070, which was the
follow-on to the 650, but, since it used core, had a conventional
instruction counter instead of a next-instruction-address field.

Back in those days, the entire programmer's reference library for any
given line of IBM's mainframes could fit into a few 3-ring binders.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The pathetic hope that the White House will turn a Caligula into a
Marcus Aurelius is as naïve as the fear that ultimate power inevitably
corrupts."
-- James D. Barber (1930-2004)

 

[Morton Goldberg]

Never had a 650 to work on, but read the manual once, a long, long,
long time ago. My first programs were written for the 7070, which
was the follow-on to the 650, but, since it used core, had a
conventional instruction counter instead of a next-instruction-
address field.

I wouldn't characterize any 70X/70X0 machine as a follow-on to the
650. They were a mainframe series derived from the Whirlwind project,
an IBM military contract. The R&D tab for the 70Xs was picked-up by
the US taxpayer. The 70Xs were vacuum tube machines and were
introduced at the same time as the 650 -- the 70X0s were the later
transistorized versions. I don't remember a 707, but if there was a
7070, I would expect a 707 existed as a predecessor. I did some
Fortran programming on a 709 and a 7040.

AFAIK, the 650 was developed as a business machine with IBM's own
funds by an entirely different engineering group than the Whirlwind
group. There is nothing in common between the two architectures. The
650 not only used dual-address instructions, it wasn't even a binary
machine. It was a dead-end architecture.

Regards, Morton

 

[Sharon Phillips]

male, 35, Australian(Canberra)

bg: Vic20 and other basics (yay!), C, Pascal, Assembler (8051,
68HC11, 80x86 and a few Pics [risc chips]), Delphi (from v2), C++
(only a bit), Java
hello world, but not much more: python(nice, but not for me), lisp
(couldn't get past the emacs bit), scheme(...), erlang(just started,
love it), Objective C(Nice, but waiting for v2), squeak(sounds great,
love Avi Bryants philosophy for Seaside, but having difficulty
getting started), ... gee, I don't know.
wk: C, PowerBuilder (not much), pl-sql (lots and lots), vba
(occasionally), Ruby (regularly)

I'm sure there's stuff I've missed, but who cares.

Dave

 

[Harry Kakueki]

Male
Preferred language (used for real work): Ruby
Others I've used for real work: BASIC, FORTRAN, C, C++, misc.
Studied but have not used for real work: Perl
Education: BS Electronics Engineering Technology, Japanese
Work: Electrical Engineer
Would like to find Ruby work.
Current location: Japan

Harry