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Thread: What counts as a programming language?

  1. #41
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    Re: What counts as a programming language?

    if the concept is that new to you there are always resources like:

    Let's Build a Compiler, by Jack Crenshaw

    I guess my perspective is different. I wrote my first trivial assembler in high school in the early 1970s as part of an independent studies project, we had no "computer classes" back then. Then in college writing a compiler "to spec" was required as part of the Computer Science program.

    So it's all pretty fundamental stuff from where I sit. I have to remember that today computers are toys you buy and far more people come to the subject as conspicuous consumers rather than as students in the field. So yeah, being old is a factor. Cars and radios aren't magic black boxes to me either.

  2. #42
    You don't want to know.
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    Re: What counts as a programming language?

    I'm actually sad I didn't grow up in that era, or get a computer faster. A ton of people cut their teeth in a time when ASM was the only 'language'. I think today it's easy to forget BASIC machines were so cool because there was no such thing as "free compilers" or, widely, "an internet" on which to get them. I guess a lot of machines before them asked you to produce binary executables as-is? Hardcore. I'm surprised I didn't think, "Hey, that's basically how punchcards worked."

    It's not unheard of for students to learn a little about writing compilers. The MIT purple book they swore by was basically that, if you could stomach the Scheme language (or even find a compiler that worked consistently on Windows.) The idea is Scheme itself is very limited in what it can do, but it's VERY good at building and executing expression trees. So the book slowly built up your skillset until you were effectively solving all of your problems by writing a compiler for a language that solved the problem. I gave up on it because instead of interpreting it as "learning to build compilers", 14-year-old-me saw it as, "So, Scheme is better than C++ but they spent 60% of the book teaching me how to implement C++'s features? No thanks."

    It's even vogue in modern programming, still. The proponents disguise it behind the fancy word "Domain-Specific-Language", but the goal's always the same. "What if we wrote a compiler for a language that's specifically tuned to this problem, instead of trying to use a general-purpose programming language?"

    But yeah, in terms of how a modern tinkerer stumbles into Windows programming, there's not a lot of talk about compilers or how one might make them. Heck, kids today usually jump straight into Windows Forms and practically don't even know what the console is. Me, I think the best course is to start in the console and only tackle WinForms after writing something neat like an adventure game in a console project. But everyone wants instant gratification and getting a form on the screen feels so much cooler

    I probably feel this way because my first programs were in TI-BASIC, Turbo Pascal, and console-oriented C++. By the time I started looking at WinForms, I already knew a great deal about working in projects with multiple classes/modules/whatever the language called them. Going from one-form to two-form projects is a HUGE stumbling block for WinForms newbies, because nothing seems to teach them what a reference is along the way.

  3. #43
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    Re: What counts as a programming language?

    There is no shortage of things to inspire a bit of wonder though. Found this today:

    SMALLEST WORKING TRAIN-SET IN THE WORLD!!!

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