Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "What's your Favourite Programming Language? (sound check Q) - Computerphile" video.

  1. Unless the question was “why is half your brain missing?”
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  2. But didn’t you have to install the “run” button? And connect it to ... whatever it’s connected to?
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  3.  @MatthewBishop64  Except that nobody cares about Dotnet Core. If C# could free itself from all these Windows encumbrances, perhaps it could become a useful language.
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  4. 4:23 “Kids can understand it” ... while I was doing my MSc degree, I volunteered to help out with informal computer classes for disabled kids at a nearby boys’ high school. Most of the other tutors were seniors from the school, supposedly intimately familiar with the school’s Apple II machines, which were what we were using. But they had only programmed in BASIC. It turned out they also had LOGO boot disks, which the boys had never used. I started up one, and gave a quick intro to the joys of list processing, doing quick-and-dirty word-for-word language translation from English to French with just a few lines of code. They were quite impressed, and agreed that the same sort of thing would be very hard to do in BASIC. And yes, LOGO was designed by Seymour Papert to be easy for kids to understand. And he has done and published the research with actual kids to prove it.
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  5. You know that modern browsers compile it to machine code, right?
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  6. Trivia question: what’s the difference between Smalltalk metaclasses and Python metaclasses?
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  7.  @RobertMilesAI  Fun fact: Python allows semicolons, so you can put multiple (simple) statements on one line! Its rule for omitting semicolons is a bit saner than the one in JavaScript.
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  8.  @Harry-lu7hj  C# does it all for you ... on only one platform. “26 drive letters ought to be enough for anybody!”
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  9. Sonic screwdriver!
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  10.  @Spongman  You may care, but that’s no guarantee it will survive. You know how capricious Microsoft can be: look at all the ideas they have promoted over time, only to abandon them. Dotnet Core is not their first attempt to replace Dotnet -- remember what happened to Silverlight?
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  11. 6:04 Graphical programming languages sound like a neat idea ... until you try to manage patches for your code and do version control.
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  12. 5:54 But the trouble with C# is that you are then stuck on Windows. Not the best choice for portable code.
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  13.  @jondreauxlaing  In Python, both functions and classes are first-class objects.
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  14.  @Harry-lu7hj  Maybe you don’t know what Python is. Its core language definition is a fraction of the size of the C# one, yet it is a more versatile and dynamic language.
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  15. I am impressed with the language extensions added in Fortran-90 and Fortran-95 for parallelizing complex operations. Quite handy for running on supercomputers. I suppose in C or C++ you use library calls to achieve the same effect.
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  16. My first language was FORTRAN. No, it’s not my favourite. Possibly because just a few months later I found out about POP-2, which totally blew my mind.
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  17. What the cluck are you talking about? Oh, I thought you said “fowl” ...
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  18. 3:06 “Don’t want to like MATLAB” ... I can relate to that. Originally it was a FORTRAN-based program for manipulating matrices. But later on they tried to tack on other functionality to it. Earlier this century I had the misfortune of having to do GUI programming in MATLAB. Let’s just say I gritted my teeth and took the money ...
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  19. Trouble with FORTH is, people seem to spend more time coming up with their own FORTH implementations than actually using it to write useful programs.
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  20. The 68K architecture derives in many ways from the DEC PDP-11. I have programmed both. ;)
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  21.  @ScottyDMcom  PDP-11 was not 32-bit, though. The genius of 68K was that even the first 68000 was more than just a 16-bit processor, it was more a cut-down 32-bit design. VAX was arguably nice than both. But that’s another story...
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  22. Perl is like quantum theory: if you think you understand it, it’s because it hasn’t been explained properly.
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  23. 3:16 “If you can only take one programming language to a desert island” ... but wouldn’t your machine also have to be able to interpret build commands? In other words, wouldn’t it also need to have a shell? And isn’t that a programming language too? In short, one programming language on its own wouldn’t be able to achieve much these days.
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