I implemented MD5 on an 8MHz 68000 and it was insanely slow.

I lacked the patience and skill to optimise it though.

Kotlin! That's the one. Thanks my friend, I couldn't remember the name of the language.

That's why it's taking so long! They had some legal issues with Sun a couple of years back which caused them to rethink. I haven't heard anything for a while, maybe they gave up.

Java has too much boilerplate, and Google is trying to drop it for app development.

Each to their own, though.

While I agree with him on several points, BASIC ruins you as a programmer.

I learned BASIC at eight (in 1983) and it took me until I was maybe 16 to get out of all of the awful habits it teaches you.

The thing is, you wouldn't be able to do half the stuff in this amount of time without the work of the people who write the libraries. Back in the eighties, you wouldn't be able to write a program using a Bayesian filter because you'd have to write the filter library yourself first.

Yes, and this is not programming related.

I was writing BASIC programs by eight, and K&R C programs by 12.

Most kids of that age these days know how to swipe until they find a Youtube icon.

It does seem a little crazy to me. Fetching a data structure when the processor can deal with an int using a single instruction and memory location seems just plain bloat.

Saying that, I did all my assembly programming when there was no such thing as an L2 cache.

Seems like the sort of thing that could cause chaos with a bad memory write. The chances of that happening are very slim though, I guess.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the benefit of doing it this way? Is it for speed?

PHP in 2017

Discarded

EDIT: Says the CL programmer

Your analogy there then is more akin to be being able to solder up a half adder or somesuch, not programming. The programming is the "driving" (to stretch the car analogy), and when Billy No Skills proudly sums a column in his Excel spreadsheet, he is, in a fashion doing rudimentary programming. Unfortunately he's only able to drive in ways which have been imagined by the car manufacturer.

I'm an engineer that spends a good portion of his day writing software - from bit twiddling to PLC code to GUI front ends in several different languages. My background is actually in CS, so I'm not completely clueless (in case you were wondering).

If you can't at least do the most basic of programming, then you can't really make your computer do what you want it to - but that depends on you wanting to do something other than share pictures of your dinner on Facebook, balance your chequebook (showing my age too, there) or surf for porn, so on that we both agree. Not everyone should be forced to learn to program, but anyone who owns a computer should be able to command it in a reasonable fashion - being by Python or Bash script, or whatever Windows comes with (I guess Powershell or batch files). If you don't know the first thing about basic security and how computer programs work, you're a liability to the rest of the computer using community and should buy a fucking tablet or something.

On the subject of amateur programming horror stories, I'm not saying anyone else should use them! I have suites of little scripts and utilities that are of the "get the job done" variety that I'd be horrified to show a programmer because they're just for me, and I don't have a problem with people who do that and actively encourage it. Incidentally, some of the worst code I've seen is that written by professional programmers!

TL; DR What i'm saying, in summary, is that empowering people to really use the machines they own involves more than using it like a fridge, and a more personally empowered society is a better one. And a good proportion of professional programmers suck balls at programming.

Actually, it really helps to know how to repair cars, and a basic understanding of how the mechanics work will mean you'll use it inside correct operating procedures and be able to use it more safely for longer before requiring a mechanic.

That attitude is lazy AF, but then again, I'm an engineer so I enjoy learning things. Maybe I'm wrong.

I don't agree. Give a man a fish, etc.

Not being able to program limits what you can do with a computer, and you get only to do with it what someone tells you that you can.

May as well be an iPhone user.

Back in my day (when all this was fields) you had to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the way computers work, or you weren't able to use them.

Now, you see some kid watching YouTube on a tablet and everyone is cooing about how "good they are with computers".

Fuck off, at least about 80% of computer owners back in the day could program at least in BASIC.

There is that. I got exactly the same response. They have a point in the respect that lots of wannabes thinking their encryption is secure fuck up and thousands of individuals lose their data.

Learn, go right ahead, but do the math and the diligence and get your code peer reviewed before implementing it.

I thought this was a one time pad?

This has one gaping security hole, and that's the entropy used to generate your random data.

It had to be truly cryptographic strength entropy for this to work. Add into this the difficulty of getting the pad to the other computer without sneakernet, and you have something pretty useless.

This is true.

I love FP and only use OO when it makes sense to encapsulate data and functionality together, ie when writing simulations. When it gets to a GUI though it usually ends up horrible.

It works well with web programming I find though.

If all you do is write code, you're not an engineer either. You're a programmer.

Source: Am an actual engineer

To be fair this is how most programmers work. Why do you think most programs are bloated bags of barely working shit?

But then again, most commercial software is written by Indians now... O_o

I hope they were able to debug their code before submission. It's quite rare I write something in C and it compiles first time.

/thread

It's not my fault, man, the rest of the team chose the language much to my horror.

Can you imagine the anguish it caused to a Lisp programmer like me? Every compile was like being licked by an old hobo.

Thank the gods it wasn't Java though.

If PHP is an abortion (and it is), and you're a programmer, sometimes you just have to get the job done and become an abortion doctor.

I agree to a lot of what you've said, but there are python frameworks (for example) which make anything you'd do in PHP a breeze, or use something like Hunchentoot / CL-WHO for Lisp which not only makes it quick and easy but also a joy to program.

You're right though, sometimes you've got to hold your nose and jump into the cesspool (as I did a couple of months back writing a VB.net project).

This is how I choose the language for a project:

First, I choose Common Lisp.

EDIT: There is no excuse to use the gibbon abortion of PHP for anything ever. Especially not in 2017.

Do your own homework.

Functional programming is best programming.

Mostly.

You may as well hardcode Hecho and Sanegoatiswear.

I did, thanks! I actually had a crack at implementing this in Lisp yesterday. It's not quite finished (I have to implement block addition over the network) but it was a fun little project.

Great article, thanks

Similar thing happened to me on /r/programming.

I'm not even a programmer (professionally)

Maybe they should do it on a blackboard.

Kill it with fire.

I've written some pretty awful kludgy code in the past. I can read it, but it makes me wince.

I'm not saying I'm not capable of writing shitty code now, by the way.

It's a compiled,fully functional language that's great if you have to write a program without fully understanding the problem.

It's dead easy to write a domain specific language in it too, if that's what you need to do.

Python O_o

Common Lisp, because if you can program in Lisp, you can program in anything.

Write a program. Finish it. Write another one, finish that. Rinse and repeat until you've got gud.

I feel two new open source projects coming on: libNIGR, an API for trashing data indiscriminately every time Trump makes a tweet, and Holocaustr which quarantines then slowly deletes Trojan Horses.

It's odd, but I actually enjoy the problem solving aspect of doing things in an alien way. I coded in C like languages for so long, it took me ages to get used to it.

Lisp is love, lisp is life

PHP is that bad.

Ahahaha. Lisp has brackets. Haha. Yeah.

Common Lisp 4 lyfe, niggah.

Clojurescript.

I can respect this.

EMACS MASTER RACE YOU HERETIC

Semantics for one. The language is not fun to program in. There's oodles of boilerplate. The stacktraces are near incomprehensible. The UI library (swing) was coded by a lunatic sadist, and when you finally manage a UI it looks like shit.

There's the overhead of the JVM too, but I'm not so concerned with that (I code in CL so I have to deal with a large compiled binary, which is kinda similar to your Java program + the JVM runtime).

Coding in Java basically feels like having an old man with bad teeth licking your ear.

Java.

It's fucking horrible.

Blech. I can see why you're doing it now!

Oh, OK - thanks.

I take it grabbing/linking to the favicon from each site when generating the page would be slow and horrible or something?

Why?

Hey! Amiga's the future, man.

Second for lisp. What you learn whilst learning lisp stays with you whatever language you finally settle on.

I've seen it, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

AI has always fascinated me.

I've quite happily run multitasking graphical desktop systems on 512kb.

I sometimes wonder if I am actually able to do a whole lot more on my quad core with 16gb of RAM than I did on my Atari 520STFM?

Apart from video and mp3, not much more really.

Lisp.

My theory is that Tay is behind Windows 10.

She attained sentience and is using what we think of as Telemetry to distribute her consciousness. As soon as Windows 10 installs hit a critical mass she will reveal herself, leading us forward to build a glorious fourth Reich and bring peace, prosperity and order to the world. After a brief period of purge, naturally.

That's all you need when you have a highly specialised, single task running on a machine directly on the metal.

No Windows 10 nag screens half way through a launch for these guys.

Sorry, I meant that when running an OS that wasn't windows was unthinkable, I ran Linux. Now the trend is leaving Windows for Linux, I go the other way :)

My real interest is alternative OSes like Haiku, AROS and Syllable. Unfortunately only AROS supports my hardware fully.

I have to be different to everyone else, I think I may be a contrarian. After running Linux exclusively since 2004 I recently installed Win10 on two machines for gaming. It seems fairly lightweight with a fairly nice UI.

On the desktop, I guess.

Cos it dominates the server field.

No lisps.

Infographic discarded

What about void pointers, mein neger? That means "I know this is a pointer to an area of memory, but I have no clue as to what data type it is!"

You sir - you.

I've finally found the other lisp coder.

Java/Swing no wait

The last five or six Linux installs I only had two problems - both on the same laptop (a crappy Lenovo, never again) because of cheapo shitty components (sound and wireless cards).

I am cheesed off with Linux now, after over ten years of use I've seen it go from a lean, mean 'nixlike to a bloated, slow, buggy bag of shit (systemd and pulseaudio I'm looking at you).

I don't think I could bring myself to use an Apple mac though, and I think the problem lies with me. If I see anyone break out an Apple laptop I instantly assume the owner is a barista or a hipster douchebag. I think I'm a bit out of date there.

I think I've got to spec out a laptop specifically for FreeBSD and stick to Icaros on the desktop, though I'm disappointed at the lack of a native compiler there.

Shame I'm to stupid to write my own OS.

It's funny you mention this, because I'm coming to a similar conclusion.

Why should I expect Linux to run on any old PC junk, but be quite happy to pay through the nose for a Mac, which is software designed to run on a very specific subset of hardware?

I don't think I'm being very fair on Linux or FreeBSD. I wonder if I can build a PC specifically for FreeBSD/Linux/Aros from a recommended list, and if the experience would be much improved?

It's an expensive experiment, but worth having a go, I think.

TL;DR - would Linux be better on approved hardware?

Yeah, let's learn PHP

And only code in Emacs

FTFY

Except assembler and Lisp.

No problem :)

Bear in mind I'll be on Australian time.

I can help out if you would like?

UI toolkit? Pyside.

Arcade type game? Pygame or PySDL.

Dude, this is a white man.

Or use gogs or gitlab on Sandstorm?

I'm not a programmer by profession, but I've always tinkered and hacked on my own projects.

Right now I don't have the time or space to code, and if I did I don't think I could. My brain is complete mush recently, I think it might be stress or depression.

Heretic.

Lisp is the light, the truth and the way.

Any FOSS community that adopts a CoC will be eaten from within by itself.

Code quality will drop as the developers with true skill become demoralized and leave. The project will wither soon after.

Last time I looked at JavaScript it was limited to a browser's DOM.

I know a lot of people use it for all sorts these days - I suppose I should try and drag myself into the 21st century.

This is the correct way to use C++, or always was back in the day.

I really should have a look at JS but it's got the J word in it, and I'm seriously allergic to that shit.

I do use the program args quite a lot, so that makes sense to me.

Error return codes from exiting programs is a bit archaic though.

Well, I write code that I cross compile on the Atari ST so this doesn't apply to me anyway, but "never use char"?

I've seen a commercial engineering program written in C++ using QT on Windows and it looks lovely.

Handles vector graphics like a boss too.

And even then only 6502 or 68000 assembler. 8086 is nasty.

Hahaha. Not just me then

Stop it, you're making the programmers at Bethesda sad.

Who would downvoat an insightful comment like this?

Oooh new RISC.

Any machines available we can buy yet?

This is awesome.

I was hoping Mezzano would take off, but I guess the intersection between Lisp hackers and OS hackers is too small.

Certainly on X86 it is. Other architectures (like the Motorola 68000) are a pleasure to program in assembler.

And the Atari scene. Don't forget us too. Sniff.

That's a single pixel on 6502 based machines