gbooch - Slashdot User

Comment It's Not The Programming Language, Stupid (Score 2) 421

by gbooch on Friday December 09, 2011 @05:49PM (#38319562) Attached to: Why We Need More Programming Languages

Just be clear, I'm not calling anyone stupid (remember what Clinton said? no no no, not "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." the other thing he said. about the economy.)

Two thoughts:

First, in a way, this is a silly discussion. Of course we need new languages. All interesting software-intensive systems are full of little languages (we just write them ourselves in other standard languages).

Second, it really isn't about the programming language. Yes, different languages make you think/act/work/abstract in fundamentally different ways, but ultimately it is the programming model of the surrounding libraries that has a greater impact on one's productivity.

Comment Re:Pffft. (Score 3, Interesting) 421

by gbooch on Friday December 09, 2011 @05:44PM (#38319494) Attached to: Why We Need More Programming Languages

I had the pleasure of conducting an oral history with the late John Backus. He reported that functional programming was a failure for the general case, for it was easy to do hard things but hard to do easy things.

I don't know what war you think functional programming is winning, but it only shows up on the minor sideline of the wars i'm engaged in.

Submission + - MacPaint Source Code Released (handbookofsoftwarearchitecture.com)

Submitted by gbooch on Tuesday July 20, 2010 @03:29AM

gbooch writes: The Computer History Museum, located in Mountain View, California, is not only a museum of hardware but also a museum of software. As reported by Arik Hesseldahl of Bloomberg today, with the permission of Apple Computer, the Museum has made available the original source code of MacPaint as well as the underlying QuickDraw graphics library.

MacPaint was written by Bill Atkinson, a member of the original Macintosh development team. Originally called MacSketch, he based it on his earlier LisaSketch (also called SketchPad) for the Apple Lisa computer. Bill started work on the Macintosh version in early 1983. He also created QuickDraw (then called LisaGraf) for the Lisa. Andy Herzfeld, another key member of the team, considers QuickDraw "the single most significant component of the original Macintosh technology" in its ability to "push pixels around in the frame buffer at blinding speeds to create the celebrated user interface."

MacPaint was released with the Macintosh in January, 1984. The application was written in Apple Pascal and was packaged in a single file of only 5,822 SLOC, together with an additional 3,583 lines of assembly code for the underlying Motorola 68 microprocessor, used to implement routines needing high performance as well as certain interfaces to the operating system. QuickDraw was the Macintosh library for creating bit-mapped graphics and was used by MacPaint and other applications, and consisted of a total of 17,11 lines of 68 assembly code packaged in 36 files.

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