[TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!
Lawrence Stewart
stewart at serissa.com
Tue Dec 4 09:00:38 AEST 2018
I’ve told this story before, but not here, I think.
Brian Reid talked me into teaching a programming language survey course at Stanford around 1983. There were programming assignments in Pascal, LISP, APL, and Snobol.
Being young and too clever, I rewrote the Snobol assignment to be matching lists of crossword puzzle solution words for across and down into a grid representing the board (X’s and O’s).
I seriously underestimated how hard this would be for new programmers, so my own solution turned out to be the second fastest.
The fastest Snobol solution was a thing that if you held it out at arms length, you would swear it was FORTRAN.
-L
> On 2018, Dec 3, at 5:24 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/3/18, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hrrumft. You can write bad code is *any* language. See the annual
>> obscure C prize.
>
> Someone once said that a good Fortran programmer can write Fortran in
> any programming language.
>
> -Paul W.
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