I think it's probably the most popular choice only because most people have probably never used any of the others. Heck I've only used BASIC but among the others Logo is the only one I've ever even heard of.
Brainfuck and Whitespace aren't so much "toy" languages as they are "joke" languages, both designed to be as unreadable as possible. Brainfuck has eight commands, each a single character (but is still Turing complete). It has no concept of variables. Here is Hello World in Brainfuck: ++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>++>+>->>+[>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.>+.>++.
Whitespace is Brainfuck taken to the next level. The only legal characters in Whitespace are space, tab and newl
I have an associate degree in computer programming and work in computer security. The only reason I program in PowerShell is because IT policy doesn't allow the use of Python.
COMAL [wikipedia.org] was a fricking cool language. Mixed up BASIC, Pascal, and some Logo-ish elements and delivered it in one easy to use package for the student.
A great language for introducing yourself to the object paradigm, but not widely used for real-world applications. I imagine most people will choose BASIC, ignoring the real-world history of its impact.
Smalltalk is a language, Squeak is an implementation of a Smalltalk VM (which can also run some other languages). Having squeak as an option is like asking what's your favourite mainstream language and expecting people to answer 'gcc' if C is their favourite language.
True, but expecting/. editors to recognise such differences is probably not a fruitful endeavour and is certainly not likely to change the options for this poll.
True, although I've recently seen an exception. A large European insurance corporation has an application running in all the insurer's office, continent-wide; the software computes insurance premiums as well as agent's commissions, has a pretty decent GUI and - communicating with the insurer's headquarters - does a lot sophisticated network I/O. It is written in Smalltalk.
Smalltalk was pretty big in industry before C++ (and later Java) took over. You might not see it much anymore but it was pretty widespread in the late 80s through mid 90s with large business customers.
Pascal used to be in high use, heck the classic versions of MacOS (a.k.a. "System", pre-OS X) were built in it, with the C libraries really just being interfaces to the Pascal libraries. The language syntax is different, but not immensely so, from C, but it does take a few more keypresses to do the same thing (my theory as to why C/C++ overtook Pascal). The program flow is also nearly identical, the main difference being that Pascal has pass-by-reference (missing from C, included in C++) in addition to pass
The language syntax is different, but not immensely so, from C,
Pascal chose to make operators different from C just to be different, and other languages chose to make them the same as C so as to not be different. Now it's just an annoyance. It's also just missing features [wikipedia.org]. Anyone who uses Pascal on purpose today is deluded.
Object Pascal has had dynamic arrays, and array initialization for some time now.
It supports ANSI strings, which are essentially null terminated strings with a descriptor, although it does still support short strings (first byte holds the length) for backward compatibility.
No one with any respect for the programmer that comes after him uses "with".
Object Pascal has functional programming constructs, method pointers, generic pointers, and pointer arithmetic -- raw and str
I never noticed them being in reverse order (though I think the stack used to grow downwards, if that's what you mean). I used to do calls to assembler routines and I never had any problems. Now you'd need 20k of XML and three layers of abstraction.
In some C implementations the [ and ] operators are just macros the expand into pointer math. Every array access is a chance to corrupt memory. I recall an ancient C manual that went so far as to say 'there is no such thing as an array'.
Modern Object Pascal languages such as Delphi or FreePascan are far from toys. In reality, they are just as powerful as C++ for 99% of use cases, but offer a more readable syntax.
Yeah, my college friends and I took this in intro(duction) to computer science. We never used it after that. And then, the classes started using C++. Argh!
I don't know what the author of that has against C. Looking at the "It's possible to destroy days of work with a single misplaced space", with C that would be "=" or semicolon. Were there ever obfustication contests being held for Fortran?
UCSD? I used that, a bit. It produced an intermediate code that ran on an interpreter, making it theoretically portable. That idea never caught on, did it?
It's a running joke around our office. More seriously, though, it's a good reminder to write code that is testable, or else some SQA team is going to unleash stuff like this for real.
In high school (early 80's) , when monitors were green only and the punch-card machine was still in the classroom, we used a variant of BASIC called Waterloo Structured Basic, which was basic but with proper looping and control structures. Never used it at home (I used Turbo Pascal, there) though.
Parent refers to the following (joke) interview that's been going around on the internet for ages:
On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the IEEE's Computer magazine. Naturally, the editors thought he would be giving a retrospective view of seven years of object-oriented design, using the language he created. By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress its contents, 'for the good of the industry' but, as with many of these things, there was a leak. Here is a complete transcript of what was was said, unedited, and unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews. You will find it interesting...
Interviewer: Well, it's been a few years since you changed the world of software design, how does it feel, looking back?
Stroustrup: Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before you arrived. Do you remember? Everyone was writing 'C' and, the trouble was, they were pretty damn good at it. Universities got pretty good at teaching it, too. They were turning out competent - I stress the word 'competent' - graduates at a phenomenal rate. That's what caused the problem.
Interviewer: Problem?
Stroustrup: Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote Cobol?
Interviewer: Of course, I did too
Stroustrup: Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty.
Interviewer: Those were the days, eh?
Stroustrup: Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it, and invested millions in training programmers, till they were a dime a dozen.
Interviewer: That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a year, to the point where being a journalist actually paid better.
Stroustrup: Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers.
Interviewer: I see, but what's the point?
Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity.
Interviewer: You're kidding...?
Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem. Unix was written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer could very easily become a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems programmer used to earn?
Interviewer: You bet I do, that's what I used to do.
Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too.
Interviewer: I don't believe you said that...
Stroustrup: Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.
Interviewer: So how exactly did you do it?
Stroustrup: It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient.
Interviewer: What?
Stroustrup: And as for 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear of a company re-using its code?
Interviewer: Well, never, actually, but...
Stroustrup: There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the early days. There was this Oregon company - Mentor Graphics, I think they were called - really caught a cold tryi
There's probably still an incarnation out there but I used to love Macromedia Lingo as featured in Director. There's still a big market for interactive CD's right? Right...hello?
I'm not sure why these are labeled "toy" languages.
If you're literally programming a toy, you'd use an embedded controller and something like Arduino (based on C/C++), or lua.
If it's intended to be languages that can't be used to build real stuff, that excludes Scheme, Scratch (SmallTalk), BASIC, and Logo, all of which are fully functional languages capable of expressing anything you like, and have all been used to write "real" software. Admittedly it'd be painful to write complex software in very old versi
Good point. It also depends on the dialect. Pure Pascal is close to useless for production software, and HP Pascal on the HP 3000 was pure Pascal with system calls. Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero, though, transformed it into Object Pascal and wrapped it in Delphi, and that is a bad-ass system for production systems on a number of platforms -- definitely not a "toy" language.
MIXAL is useful because of Knuth. ToyCode is useful in implementing an assembler, compiler, and interpreter targeting it, all in a single semester or two quarters of a CS curriculum. Try building a JVM in that time.
Had to go with BASIC, as the only choice that I had heard of, but I don't really consider it a toy language. My first job was programming automated trading systems in BASIC, and FORTRAN.
Well not really a toy language (It has some very serious uses as a "toaster code" language), but its great fun to screw around with. Its basically an inverted lisp that works with stacks instead of lists, and it can be surprisingly powerful in the right hands due to its ability to cook up complicated datastructures and things to do with those structures. In its basic form , it doesnt even have a concept of a variable,well not one as commonly understood in other languages. A page or two of code later, and i
Forth is actually a lot more common than many people realize. In addition to its use in embedded programming (the "toasters" you referred to), it was also used to bootstrap Sun Sparc boxes. Which means that every one of them was another instance of Forth in the wild. I once picked up a free Sparcstation from someone, which I was going to use to help work on Sparc Linux, but it had such crappy network hardware that I ended up spending more time playing around with the Forth it came with, writing things like
Putting Basic on there isn't fair. It's been around FOREVER and just about everyone, at some point or another, has had to muck with it.
I can claim more than a passing tryst with it -- at one job I used VAX Basic working on hospital software. Since VAX Basic could make system calls, it was pretty powerful, and we did some pretty neat stuff with it. Calling it a "toy language" would do it justice.
I'm playing with graphics stuff at the moment, and so I want a language that makes graphics easy. There are dozens of languages that can happily puke text stuff out on the console, but which make you reinvent the wheel if you want to throw some shapes. There's even a web-based system, for it, OpenProcessing.
...back in the fairly early days. Branch (of various forms) as the only flow control. Odd scoping rules. Often faster to rewrite a line of code from scratch than to figure out what you had written the previous time. OTOH, having a full symbolic debugger really spoiled me.
More seriously, though, it still has a solid niche in low-resource environments like embedded systems. For example, the Functional Test Kernels in the Boeing 777 avionics hardware are all written in FORTH, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District uses FORTH for the control software for PV1 and PV2, their solar power generation arrays.
I'm convinced that more people have implemented Forth than have written programs in Forth.
If you haven't yet implemented your own Forth, I highly recommend it. It doesn't take long, and it's a lot of fun. You'll also very quickly discover why the above AC's old adage rings so true.
I will dare to say that C++ is doing portable software better than java.
I have Java programs with sophisticated user interfaces that I can run on both Linux and Windows with the same jar file. You can't do that with C++. I would like to try it with a Mac, but I do not have access to one right now.
I tried about four usernames (including some that I thought were pretty obscure) and they all turned out to be used. Javagator popped into my head and it worked. Java is not my favorite language, C++ is, but if I have to write a program to run on more than one OS and runtime efficiency isn't a factor, I think Java is a good choice.
Java is a toy language, We've created neat little toys to abstract away what's really happening, and, of course, in the process, created complexity and bloat.
After a long career as a programmer, one of my main responsibilities at the moment is hiring new programmers (I'm building a team). I do somewhere between 3 and 5 phone screens a week, weeding out the useful programmers from the bad. Most of the people who primarily learned Java in college are, in fact, piss-poor programmers. That's not to say that there aren't any shit programmers who aren't Java programmers, but I see a very clear trend in the hundreds of phone screens I've done so far. Java programmers,
There's been a vast explosion in the types of Computer Science and Engineer courses available. In the 1980's, you did "pure" subjects: computer science, mathematics, physics, statistics. Now the same departments are teaching courses in big data and visualisation, new media technologies (mobile, web, internet).
I consider Javascript a "toy" language. Even though you can write some pretty sophisticated software with it, it is still very easy to pick up & use with web pages. No need for a compiler or IDE. Just a good old plain text editor. The browser is your debugger.
Javascript is a good first language for students to learn. Learn the basics of variables, loops, operators, arrays, branching logic, etc. It's too bad about the name though. I still run into tons of people who *should* know better that still confus
Yes agree. I make a living out of Perl, so I'm biased, but, if you use it simply, it's pretty much Basic. I voted for, Basic, OK I'm old, but 'Hunt the Wumpus' etc. helped a lot of people, and, Basic was designed (like Scratch) to be a simple on-ramp for non-programmers.
I used to work for a company that did hardware and software for the printing industry. We ate, lived
and breathed PostScript.
One of my favourite demonstrations was the Towers of Hanoi in PostScript. Feed a file to the printer,
it thought for a few seconds, then printed a page with the moves on it.
I think PostScript was the first stack-based language I used (although it might have been Java bytecode - it was a long time ago), and it is quite nice for graphical programming. But my "other" vote went to CJam [sourceforge.net], which is also stack-based, functional, and although designed for code golf is good for general-purpose quick scripts.
C (and C++) would have been real languages if they had real pre-processors. If you need 3rd party language to do your code generation, you've missed the whole point of what people actually do with languages. It's not good for moving bits around (because there is no language built-in way to easily reference elements both by position and by name within a construct) and it's not good for doing computations (because you don't have natural vectorized operations supported by most modern processors).
or c) have no legitimate applications beyond being entertaining in themselves.
from the list, only Brainfuck and Whitespace are "toy" languages. The rest are all useful in the right context.
I got some error handling code, but unfortunately the error message only activates when you explicitly check for errors and the only message is [cold]Nothing is wrong.[/cold].
The easiest way to figure the cost of living is to take your income and
add ten percent.
Basic (Score:3, Insightful)
I would hardly qualify basic as a "Toy" language.
Maybe today is less useful than it was before, but many a system/program/game was built on it.
PS: My vote went for logo
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I think it's probably the most popular choice only because most people have probably never used any of the others. Heck I've only used BASIC but among the others Logo is the only one I've ever even heard of.
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Scheme is a minimalist dialect of Lisp. You have heard of Lisp, right?
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Brainfuck and Whitespace aren't so much "toy" languages as they are "joke" languages, both designed to be as unreadable as possible. Brainfuck has eight commands, each a single character (but is still Turing complete). It has no concept of variables. Here is Hello World in Brainfuck:
++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>++>+>->>+[>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.>+.>++.
Whitespace is Brainfuck taken to the next level. The only legal characters in Whitespace are space, tab and newl
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This. I haven't heard of any other than Basic, and if you look at Visual Basic, you can do a lot of heavy stuff with it.
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Which is what, exactly? I'm not a programmer. I bet you haven't heard of most stuff I use daily at work (and I work in IT).
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I'm not a programmer.
Yes it reflects that then lol Which clearly isn't a problem given this:
(and I work in IT).
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I learned BASIC on a variety of Sanyo MBC-55, Commodore 64 and Apple ][ + (In that order).
I Learned logo on said Commodore, around the same time.
I was 12 (I am 43 now), logo was forced on me (two of the classmates were younger) but I liked it nonetheless.
The "Serious" programs I did in BASIC, I did in GW-BASIC, then ported to QuickBasic in order to be able to "Compile" them.
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Richer!
I think it was one chip of ram and a new prom for the character generator. Assuming you're talking about a Trash80 model 1.
I shouldn't remember that. Brain needs old junk files deleted and a defrag badly.
Anyhow, On topic: Javascript.
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Most languages mentioned are not 'toy languages' and obviously the question was about languages 'you like to toy around with'.
My answer was Squeak, but the question and answer should have been SmallTalk.
Put it back in the sidebar (Score:2)
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All of them (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have fun with them, they're all toys.
COMAL (Score:2)
COMAL [wikipedia.org] was a fricking cool language. Mixed up BASIC, Pascal, and some Logo-ish elements and delivered it in one easy to use package for the student.
No love for LOLCODE? (Score:2)
http://lolcode.org/ [lolcode.org]
KTHXBYE!
Smalltalk (Score:2)
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You should vote for Squeak, then. (I did.)
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True, but expecting /. editors to recognise such differences is probably not a fruitful endeavour and is certainly not likely to change the options for this poll.
So I voted for the closest thing available.
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but not widely used for real-world applications.
True, although I've recently seen an exception. A large European insurance corporation has an application running in all the insurer's office, continent-wide; the software computes insurance premiums as well as agent's commissions, has a pretty decent GUI and - communicating with the insurer's headquarters - does a lot sophisticated network I/O. It is written in Smalltalk.
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Smalltalk was pretty big in industry before C++ (and later Java) took over. You might not see it much anymore but it was pretty widespread in the late 80s through mid 90s with large business customers.
LOLCode (Score:2)
Pascal (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pascal (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Pascal used to be in high use, heck the classic versions of MacOS (a.k.a. "System", pre-OS X) were built in it, with the C libraries really just being interfaces to the Pascal libraries. The language syntax is different, but not immensely so, from C, but it does take a few more keypresses to do the same thing (my theory as to why C/C++ overtook Pascal). The program flow is also nearly identical, the main difference being that Pascal has pass-by-reference (missing from C, included in C++) in addition to pass
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The language syntax is different, but not immensely so, from C,
Pascal chose to make operators different from C just to be different, and other languages chose to make them the same as C so as to not be different. Now it's just an annoyance. It's also just missing features [wikipedia.org]. Anyone who uses Pascal on purpose today is deluded.
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It's also just missing features [wikipedia.org].
Taking from the page you reference...
Object Pascal has had dynamic arrays, and array initialization for some time now.
It supports ANSI strings, which are essentially null terminated strings with a descriptor, although it does still support short strings (first byte holds the length) for backward compatibility.
No one with any respect for the programmer that comes after him uses "with".
Object Pascal has functional programming constructs, method pointers, generic pointers, and pointer arithmetic -- raw and str
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MacOS is not a good example of a good example. ;)
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Probably depends on the implementation, but I've definitely taken advantage of that feature on MS Pascal. Maybe Version 6, mid 80s.
Memory fades, but I thought Pascal had some kind of addr() function? Anyway, it's all glorified peeks and pokes.
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Object pascal (what sat behind Delphi) had it's own &* operators. Don't recall exactly what they were.
Operands were stuffed onto the stack in reverse order. But other than that calling between Delphi and C++ dlls was pretty straightforward.
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I never noticed them being in reverse order (though I think the stack used to grow downwards, if that's what you mean). I used to do calls to assembler routines and I never had any problems. Now you'd need 20k of XML and three layers of abstraction.
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In some C implementations the [ and ] operators are just macros the expand into pointer math. Every array access is a chance to corrupt memory. I recall an ancient C manual that went so far as to say 'there is no such thing as an array'.
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Modern Object Pascal languages such as Delphi or FreePascan are far from toys. In reality, they are just as powerful as C++ for 99% of use cases, but offer a more readable syntax.
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Yeah, my college friends and I took this in intro(duction) to computer science. We never used it after that. And then, the classes started using C++. Argh!
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They thought the same about Excel, now it runs Fortune 500 companies.
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See: http://web.mit.edu/humor/Compu... [mit.edu]
I don't know what the author of that has against C. Looking at the "It's possible to destroy days of work with a single misplaced space", with C that would be "=" or semicolon. Were there ever obfustication contests being held for Fortran?
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UCSD? I used that, a bit. It produced an intermediate code that ran on an interpreter, making it theoretically portable. That idea never caught on, did it?
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USCD bytecode was for a long time the most used target language for compilers, mainly for pascal.
Around the 1970s the majourity of computers ran it.
Bottom line it is extremely similar to Java and .Net byte code.
GLSL (Score:2)
GLSL : very specific but fun to play with...
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I wouldn't call the language itself a toy language but shadertoy [shadertoy.com] is indeed a great toy.
Have we all forgotten Ook! (Score:2)
http://esolangs.org/wiki/ook [esolangs.org]!
The *only* programming language designed *specifically* for Orangutans. Think of the outsourcing possibilities....
Vigil! (Score:2)
It's a running joke around our office. More seriously, though, it's a good reminder to write code that is testable, or else some SQA team is going to unleash stuff like this for real.
For those not enlightened: The Github repository [github.com]
Klingon (Score:2)
TI-BASIC (Score:3)
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Ha! I learned BASIC in 1976 (or was it 1978?) on a DEC PDP 11/70, typing commands on a DECwriter II - the way God intended.
Man, that old Star Trek game wasted a lot of fanfold paper...
No love for Malbolge? (Score:4, Interesting)
Truly for the maleficent (Score:2)
This Malbolge program displays "Hello World!", with both words capitalized and exclamation mark at the end.
INTERCAL (Score:3)
Waterloo Structured Basic (Score:2)
C++ (Score:5, Funny)
Oh. Sorry. You meant toy languages, not jokes that got out of hand. Me bad.
...laura
Re:C++ (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent refers to the following (joke) interview that's been going around on the internet for ages:
On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the IEEE's Computer magazine. Naturally, the editors thought he would be giving a retrospective view of seven years of object-oriented design, using the language he created. By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress its contents, 'for the good of the industry' but, as with many of these things, there was a leak. Here is a complete transcript of what was was said, unedited, and unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews. You will find it interesting...
Interviewer: Well, it's been a few years since you changed the world of software design, how does it feel, looking back?
Stroustrup: Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before you arrived. Do you remember? Everyone was writing 'C' and, the trouble was, they were pretty damn good at it. Universities got pretty good at teaching it, too. They were turning out competent - I stress the word 'competent' - graduates at a phenomenal rate. That's what caused the problem.
Interviewer: Problem?
Stroustrup: Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote Cobol?
Interviewer: Of course, I did too
Stroustrup: Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty.
Interviewer: Those were the days, eh?
Stroustrup: Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it, and invested millions in training programmers, till they were a dime a dozen.
Interviewer: That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a year, to the point where being a journalist actually paid better.
Stroustrup: Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers.
Interviewer: I see, but what's the point?
Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity.
Interviewer: You're kidding...?
Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem. Unix was written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer could very easily become a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems programmer used to earn?
Interviewer: You bet I do, that's what I used to do.
Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too.
Interviewer: I don't believe you said that...
Stroustrup: Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.
Interviewer: So how exactly did you do it?
Stroustrup: It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient.
Interviewer: What?
Stroustrup: And as for 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear of a company re-using its code?
Interviewer: Well, never, actually, but...
Stroustrup: There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the early days. There was this Oregon company - Mentor Graphics, I think they were called - really caught a cold tryi
Toys? (Score:2)
Macromedia Lingo (Score:2)
Piet (Score:2)
Intercal (Score:2)
C++17 (Score:2)
Simulink (Score:2)
What is a "toy" language? (Score:2)
I'm not sure why these are labeled "toy" languages.
If you're literally programming a toy, you'd use an embedded controller and something like Arduino (based on C/C++), or lua.
If it's intended to be languages that can't be used to build real stuff, that excludes Scheme, Scratch (SmallTalk), BASIC, and Logo, all of which are fully functional languages capable of expressing anything you like, and have all been used to write "real" software. Admittedly it'd be painful to write complex software in very old versi
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Good point. It also depends on the dialect. Pure Pascal is close to useless for production software, and HP Pascal on the HP 3000 was pure Pascal with system calls. Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero, though, transformed it into Object Pascal and wrapped it in Delphi, and that is a bad-ass system for production systems on a number of platforms -- definitely not a "toy" language.
MIXAL or ToyCode; either one. (Score:2)
MIXAL or ToyCode; either one.
MIXAL is useful because of Knuth. ToyCode is useful in implementing an assembler, compiler, and interpreter targeting it, all in a single semester or two quarters of a CS curriculum. Try building a JVM in that time.
Turbo Pascal (Score:2)
I loved Turbo Pascal 7 under MS-DOS 6.21... I had graphics, multi-tasking, piping between processes all figured out. Ah, those were the days.
english (Score:2)
Whitespace (Score:2)
Whitespace, err, I mean Python.
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Had to go with BASIC (Score:2)
ISETL (Score:2)
HyperTalk for HyperCard (Score:2)
Other (Score:2)
CowboyNeal's lingo.
Arnold C (Score:3)
Forth (Score:2)
Well not really a toy language (It has some very serious uses as a "toaster code" language), but its great fun to screw around with. Its basically an inverted lisp that works with stacks instead of lists, and it can be surprisingly powerful in the right hands due to its ability to cook up complicated datastructures and things to do with those structures. In its basic form , it doesnt even have a concept of a variable ,well not one as commonly understood in other languages. A page or two of code later, and i
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Forth is actually a lot more common than many people realize. In addition to its use in embedded programming (the "toasters" you referred to), it was also used to bootstrap Sun Sparc boxes. Which means that every one of them was another instance of Forth in the wild. I once picked up a free Sparcstation from someone, which I was going to use to help work on Sparc Linux, but it had such crappy network hardware that I ended up spending more time playing around with the Forth it came with, writing things like
Take BASIC off (Score:2)
Putting Basic on there isn't fair. It's been around FOREVER and just about everyone, at some point or another, has had to muck with it.
I can claim more than a passing tryst with it -- at one job I used VAX Basic working on hospital software. Since VAX Basic could make system calls, it was pretty powerful, and we did some pretty neat stuff with it. Calling it a "toy language" would do it justice.
(Open)Processing (Score:2)
I'm playing with graphics stuff at the moment, and so I want a language that makes graphics easy. There are dozens of languages that can happily puke text stuff out on the console, but which make you reinvent the wheel if you want to throw some shapes. There's even a web-based system, for it, OpenProcessing.
Prolog (Score:2)
Yes, I know.
APL... (Score:3)
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FORTH [HEART] IF HONK THEN
More seriously, though, it still has a solid niche in low-resource environments like embedded systems. For example, the Functional Test Kernels in the Boeing 777 avionics hardware are all written in FORTH, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District uses FORTH for the control software for PV1 and PV2, their solar power generation arrays.
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I'm really digging gforth for Android. It even seems to support disassembly in the SEE word.
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I'm convinced that more people have implemented Forth than have written programs in Forth.
If you haven't yet implemented your own Forth, I highly recommend it. It doesn't take long, and it's a lot of fun. You'll also very quickly discover why the above AC's old adage rings so true.
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I write a lot of utility programs in Java. They work on both Linux and Windows. I find Java reasonably powerful although not as fast as C++.
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I have Java programs with sophisticated user interfaces that I can run on both Linux and Windows with the same jar file. You can't do that with C++. I would like to try it with a Mac, but I do not have access to one right now.
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I tried about four usernames (including some that I thought were pretty obscure) and they all turned out to be used. Javagator popped into my head and it worked. Java is not my favorite language, C++ is, but if I have to write a program to run on more than one OS and runtime efficiency isn't a factor, I think Java is a good choice.
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Java is a toy language, We've created neat little toys to abstract away what's really happening, and, of course, in the process, created complexity and bloat.
After a long career as a programmer, one of my main responsibilities at the moment is hiring new programmers (I'm building a team). I do somewhere between 3 and 5 phone screens a week, weeding out the useful programmers from the bad. Most of the people who primarily learned Java in college are, in fact, piss-poor programmers. That's not to say that there aren't any shit programmers who aren't Java programmers, but I see a very clear trend in the hundreds of phone screens I've done so far. Java programmers,
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There's been a vast explosion in the types of Computer Science and Engineer courses available. In the 1980's, you did "pure" subjects: computer science, mathematics, physics, statistics. Now the same departments are teaching courses in big data and visualisation, new media technologies (mobile, web, internet).
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I consider Javascript a "toy" language. Even though you can write some pretty sophisticated software with it, it is still very easy to pick up & use with web pages. No need for a compiler or IDE. Just a good old plain text editor. The browser is your debugger.
Javascript is a good first language for students to learn. Learn the basics of variables, loops, operators, arrays, branching logic, etc. It's too bad about the name though. I still run into tons of people who *should* know better that still confus
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Also C# (I use it for prototyping all the time) and F# (has anyone EVER written ANY production code in that?).
Agree on Perl - again, I use it for a lot of prototyping but haven't written anything for production in it since the 1990's.
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Snobol 4 was not a toy, but the original SNOBOL? Definitely!
And wierder than perl. That has to be worth something!
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Hypercard
HTTP
Emacs?
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Well, to me Python is a toy language as well.
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I used to work for a company that did hardware and software for the printing industry. We ate, lived and breathed PostScript.
One of my favourite demonstrations was the Towers of Hanoi in PostScript. Feed a file to the printer, it thought for a few seconds, then printed a page with the moves on it.
...laura
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I think PostScript was the first stack-based language I used (although it might have been Java bytecode - it was a long time ago), and it is quite nice for graphical programming. But my "other" vote went to CJam [sourceforge.net], which is also stack-based, functional, and although designed for code golf is good for general-purpose quick scripts.
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You can do worse (Score:2)
What about a Brainfuck interpreter in TECO [wikipedia.org]?
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I got some error handling code, but unfortunately the error message only activates when you explicitly check for errors and the only message is [cold]Nothing is wrong.[/cold].