59 years ago today, the first computer program written in #BASIC was run.
The easy-to-learn and -use #programming language revolutionized #computing. A decade later, #BillGates would co-found #Microsoft to develop and sell the BASIC interpreter for the #Altair 8800, the first commercially successful desktop microcomputer.
For real, whoever is saying that F# or OCaml require a PhD in Math or are languages just for math, science, and academic stuff is completely lying to you, it is no harder than learning JavaScript/python or any other language out there.
What do you say to whitespace-sensitive/oriented programming languages, assuming your IDE supports the whitespace-behaviour really well, and all the tooling around it is generally good?
Finished reading "Type Systems for Memory Safety" https://borretti.me/article/type-systems-memory-safety by Fernando Borretti. It is a comprehensive review of various type system features across different #ProgrammingLanguages that are used to enforce (varying degrees of) memory safety at compile time.
As expected, it talks a lot about #Rust because Rust is probably the most used PL with compile time memory safety, but it features other languages like Ada, Val and Austral as well.
An interesting read if you are interested in #compilers.
Join us tomorrow for Episode 3 of the Causal Islands Podcast!
We're speaking with special guests Jon Corbett about acimow/Cree#, his Cree programming language, and @nasser about Alb, his Arabic programming language.
If you have any ideas, suggestions or want to contribute then please use GitHub Discussions section or email us on the address mentioned in our GitHub profile. 👨💻
CBI Image o' Day. A 1969 note from Grace Hopper to Jack Jones, US Air Force on their CODASYL work & COBOL’s creation by her, Jean Sammet, Jones, +others. Hopper is suggesting important contributors to CODASYL who were at the '59 demo, to invite for the '69 COBOL 10th Anniversary Celebration including Alan Taylor who had become Editor of then new magazine Computerworld.
I've been learning Lua this week for no reason (LÖVE), and I don't know why devs joke about "arrays starting at 1" when this shit is more hilarious IMO
I'm currently looking at annotations / decorations to a research programming language to estimate runtime non-asymptotically (i.e. gimme a number) in a simple execution model. I thought there might be (have been) some similar projects, but I'm not really sure where to look. I vaguely remember some work on proving loop bounds (e.g. polyhedrally). Any hints?
#OCaml is adding ownership vs unique (mut) references vs shared references distinction – but with no generic lifetimes (thus references must be local to the callee to not prevent unique access in later calls – function calls can’t leak them to outside state).
Does anyone know of an APL compiler or transpiler that can generated Vulkan or OpenGL shader scripts? (Free/libre would be most appreciated.) I think Aaron Hsu might have engineered something like this at some point, but I can't find anything about it at all right now, probably thanks to our amazing new "AI-enhanced" search engines.
Fascinating as they are, AI assistants are not works of logic; they are works of words. They have become incredibly good at producing text that looks right. For many applications that is enough, not for programming though.
When a programming language's website says it's a "general-purpose language", I already kind of want to not use it, because it probably won't offer anything that I can't get in another language.
I'd like to see a world where every language serves exactly one area of programming, and is highly specialized for that area.