[lordmauve]

> > Nobody in their right mind would want to learn programming in BCPL

> I agree, but that's not what the author thinks:

The author of this document is Martin Richards, the creator of BCPL. Of course he thinks you would want to learn it.

[082349872349872]

We've all been a young person[0], so it's easy to criticise from that angle.

However, I'd like to think the readership of HN are hacker enough to like to think that, given a desert island (with minor deps like sand and the Friday hardware fab!) and a few spare years, they'd be capable of Robinson Crusoe'ing up a personal development environment.

From that point of view, I find[1] this effort admirable: it's several hundred pages, by Martin Richards, about the port of the BCPL toolchain (language, compiler, bytecode interpreter, libraries, debugger, etc. all by Martin Richards?) to a new system (was it a new arch as well?)... by Martin Richards.

How many among us get a machine with new graphics, decide to write a flight simulator, and then —only as a minor[2] implementation detail mind you— plumb float support through our entire language ecosystem? Who needs a shaved yak when you're pursuing the buttery-smooth shaded yak?

[0] or maybe we even still are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682353

"when I was your age all we had were 1's and 0's, and sometimes not even 0's, so we'd stay up all night xor'ing 1's to have enough for the next day..."

[1] when I did this sort of thing to pay the bills, I had someone else doing the tech writing and someone else providing toolchain and debugger sources, and it was still not a trivial lift.

[2] compare Wirth FPGA'ing up an entire homebrewed arch just so he could have a personal workstation using his favourite mouse.