Tagged "programming language"

In a field that has elevated boy geniuses and rockstar coders, obscure hacks and complex black-boxed algorithms, it’s perhaps no wonder that a committee-designed language meant to be easier to learn and use—and which was created by a team that included multiple women in positions of authority—would be held in low esteem. But modern computing has started to become undone, and to undo other parts of our societies, through the field’s high opinion of itself, and through the way that it concentrates power into the hands of programmers who mistake social, political, and economic problems for technical ones, often with disastrous results.

I haven’t done a link log in ages. Here is a miniature one for you!

• More Parseable Output, Please., Collin Donnell putting people over computers. Yes please!
• Smoked Carrot Lox, to go with all the bagels I’ve been baking lately
• Forth
  • gforth’s manual
  • forth v lisp
  • a whole heap of resources on forth
  • factor tutorial
  • …I’m pretty excited about forth, and other Concatenative programming languages these days
• Elevators Changed Cities. Will Coronavirus Change Elevators?
• Voice driven development, an interesting tech demo from Emily Shea on how she writes software with her voice instead of typing
• Getting started with Mini vMac, an introduction to retro mac computing without needing to buy a whole heap of ancient hardware! Emulation station, choo choo!
• For 32 Years, This Japanese Chef Has Been Making a Painting of Every Single Meal He Eats. See His Mouth-Watering Work Here, I am fascinated by long running projects like this. Projects that toe the line by being somewhere between a meditative practice and a compulsion
• Make a PDF looked like a scanned doc using ImageMagick, Piper Haywood’s neat trick to make a PDF look like it has been scanned to appease the monster of bureaucracy

Before brainfuck and Befunge, there was INTERCAL. Its revival in 1990 by ESR may mark the beginning of the esolang movement, but the language dates back to 1972, when it was created in a famous late-night session at Princeton by Don Woods and Jim Lyon. The original version INTERCAL (sometimes called INTERCAL 72) is a rich parody with a more chaotic sense of play than its later revivals. Its instructions are deliberately vague and embrace an almost-believable hacker jargon, collected in a straight-faced, well-organized manual. Don Woods not only co-created INTERCAL, but is also noted for Colossal Cave Adventure, and the original version of the Hacker Dictionary: three essential cultural objects of geek culture.