Favorite programming language(s)?

blackbird9 said:
Presumably it had pluggable specialised medical instrumentation cards as well.
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Yes it did.

blackbird9 said:
I wonder if you used OS/9?
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No. It used a realtime OS which name I do not recall.

blackbird9 said:
If they're still selling it now, it would be interesting to know what 68k-descendent CPU they have used in the current product
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I built it in 1992. It was still in the same form factor around 2015. I stopped at the office last year to visit someone but he wasn't there. They had their product line on display in the lobby and my product looked nothing like anything I put together. Whether the box still was VME based, I do not know, but it is still one of their top selling products.

blackbird9 said:
If they're still selling it now, it would be interesting to know what 68k-descendent CPU they have used in the current product, presumably it still uses some variant of the 68k core.
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A year or more ago they were using NXP Kinetis MCUs and Intel (Altera) MAX10 FPGAs
 
Is it correct VME had hot swap/insert. Basically a back-plane where you can insert a cpu-card , a network-card, a drive-card , etc ...
 
I just looked at TIOBE to survey the options and my favorite is PHP. Since the question is "favorite" I don't feel the need to justify why it is the "best," because it is not, just my "favorite."

(My other options were C,C++,Java,JavaScript,Python,Perl,VB,Rust,Objective-C,SQL)
 
But neither of those are my favorite, they are simply things I know enough about to have a reasonable opinion.
 
jbo@ said:
And when it comes to C++ specifically, most of the time people are completely oblivious to modern C++.
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My position is that the opposite effect hurts C++. It has gotten so big and complicated that you spend large amounts of time learning it (more than for other languages), then nobody can read each other's code, and just when you are through that there is another C++ standard with lots of syntactically "interesting" new features - most of which are to patch out rough edges in the previous features. That has been an endless circle for a while now and there is no end in sight. It is 2024 and I didn't even start on C++23.
 
grahamperrin said:
… analyse web logs, in the mid-1990s? Was that amongst its use cases, or is my (Mac user) memory mistaken?
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Graham, not really... funnelweb is a literate programming (Knuth) macro language that was/is used as a source code and documentation generator. It's typically used to write code more efficiently, ie fewer lines of source macros that generate a typically much larger amount of source code in some other computer language. The same macro language source code is also used to generate the documentation, hence 'literate' programming. Both the target source code and documentation are generated from the same macro language source.

FunnelWeb itself appears to be pretty much dead now (according to the author's website), but there are other more mainstream literate programming tools available, there is a list here:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming . I don't consider myself to be any kind of expert in it, funnelweb is the only such tool that I have used in anger.

It's an interesting technique, I think it particularly lends itself to code that is highly abstract such as complex state machine generators, protocol stacks, that kind of thing. You probably wouldn't write a GUI or device driver with this approach though (although I am happy to stand corrected if anyone has done so!).

Donald Knuth, who really originated the concept, has a webpage on literate programming here:- https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html
 
Drhowarddrfine, yes I expect they've engineered it away from the old VME eurocard format (assuming that's what you used), all the medical electronics I've seen in hospital has typically been in custom moulded casings, sometimes highly customised PC units, not like this photo which is the kind of thing I think of when I think of 68k vme bus systems :) .

So I imagine you also designed the analogue instrumentation circuitry to interface to transducers, sensors, etc, as well as the digital side. Very interesting stuff. I'm impressed that they are still selling an updated version of it now, your original design has stood the test of time. I'm not surprised to hear it's been re-engineered a couple of times since those days! It's always interesting to learn about other people's projects :)

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cracauer@ said:
My position is that the opposite effect hurts C++. It has gotten so big and complicated that you spend large amounts of time learning it (more than for other languages), then nobody can read each other's code, and just when you are through that there is another C++ standard with lots of syntactically "interesting" new features - most of which are to patch out rough edges in the previous features. That has been an endless circle for a while now and there is no end in sight. It is 2024 and I didn't even start on C++23.
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It's not necessary to learn every single new feature and use them. Some major ones like ranges help simplify code and others like concepts are complex for a reason, many are related to templates and are there to improve C++ functional programming support.
 
Criosphinx said:
It's not necessary to learn every single new feature and use them. Some major ones like ranges help simplify code and others like concepts are complex for a reason, many are related to templates and are there to improve C++ functional programming support.
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So what do I do when I work on code already using the features I skipped learning?

I also want more functional programming support. That OO stuff can go to hell. But C++20 Concepts are nasty to learn at home since you really don't need them inside the scope of personal programming.

I see what you are saying, you can "assemble" a very nice subset of C++ features as your personal dialect.
 
I wholeheartedly despise virtually all programming languages. I have a respect for a particular "tier" of language, like C++ and C , as I get the impression they actually achieve something. The rest appear to be cults attended by sheep developers pushed by influential nutjobs with agendas for power, or to satisfy some pathological thirst to push something overly-complicated as a vane demonstration of their intelligence.

Pays the food, puts bills on the table, though. I get that. Unless it's FOSS.
 
taiwan740 said:
I wholeheartedly despise virtually all programming languages. I have a respect for a particular "tier" of language, like C++ and C , as I get the impression they actually achieve something. The rest appear to be cults attended by sheep developers pushed by influential nutjobs with agendas for power, or to satisfy some pathological thirst to push something overly-complicated as a vane demonstration of their intelligence.
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I find your lack of faith disturbing...
 
blackbird9 said:
Donald Knuth, who really originated the concept, has a webpage on literate programming here:- https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html
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I missed all that, 40 and 50 years ago, for rural living. As well as that, I bookmarked a link from there:

Literate Programming -- Propaganda and Tools

All Good Stuff.

As is the VMEbus chatter; my M68010 '84 pseudo job was on an Motorola-branded VME system costing (I was told) some AU$10k, an awesome amount then - but I can't recall what it was called, its physical characteristics or much about its proprietary VME-? OS.

I remember the boss' brand new 128k Mac better; I got to play with LOGO a bit, which I liked a lot.

[ nearly drowning in nostalgia :-]
 
If I had to limit my choice to the languages listed in The University of Cambridge's Eureka magazine, on page 21, Volume 29, it lists the SPUDSAC I computer. There it states: "Most programmingis done in Spudsac Tomatocode, which is similar to ordinary language."

An example is below:
Code: 
TITLE: PREPARATION OF VEG TABLES AT INTERVALS OF FIVE DEGREES
0) REGULO:= INPUT
PAN:= PAN + CARROTS
REPEAT till CARROTS > 67
for HEINZ = 1:1:57
BOIL until done
RETURN
X:= INNER PRODUCT (PAN)
JUMP if X IS HOT
STOP!
Of course I've added additional ingredient statements to my taste from time to time.
 
kpedersen said:
To help exemplify just how elegant procedural can be?
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To be fair, different people do have differently wired heads.

I'd written a strictly precedural solar system astronomy program, originally on 10 magnetic cards for the TI SR-52 in '74, moved to my Signetics 2650 kit homebrew in asm from '78, thereafter Turbo Pascal on Epson PX-8 under CP/M ~'85, then DOS, later OS/2 from ~'92.

A friend was enchanted by Object Pascal and rewrote the whole thing that way, adding a useful semi-GUI interface, but I rewrote lots of it procedurally later. We're still friends ;-}
 
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