It's common knowledge that reading off your slides is generally bad and makes for terrible presentation, but he does better than just avoiding that. The slides are always something he can look at at the end of a point, like a 'turn' of sorts. Sometimes it's to demonstrate what he's talking about; sometimes it's comic effect to show what he was referring but not by name before; sometimes it's a segue to a new heading that fills the beat after the previous one.
Not that 'giving good presentations' is so rare a skill that it needs to be called out, but, he's so consistently good about slide usage that I think his style is worth explicitly noting and copying.
It's actually more reasonable than PHP. It has case sensitivity on the first character of each identifier, but PHP has case sensitivity on variables, but not on functions.
It also lacks the header files of C, as seen by the fact that there wasn't a header file posted for the example.
If it wasn't clearly satire, this language would actually have fans and apologists. "Why do you care about the greek question mark? It's a European language, use the preprocessor to replace it why any character you want, it's that flexible!"
Many modern languages sort of have 'DO COME FROM' in the form of exceptions. Having to execute PLEASE regularly (but not too often) is not that different from a buggy version of Oracle PL/SQL I had to use once, where single-line comments sometimes made the next line be ignored as well. Or a research language called Emerald for which the implementation needed extra comments or dummy statements to make the compiler not crash + the garbage collector was buggy so you needed to create and manipulate dummy objects Just So to make the garbage collector throw /them/ away instead of the ones you actually cared about.
I'd say the only unique aspects of Intercal are the stupid numbers and the delightfully twisted way they added threads to it (by having more than one DO COME FROM statement with the same label).
Sed is like the predecessor to Brainfuck. Every keyword worth using is a single letter, and there are the match space and hold space to keep track of. Plus if you accidentally forget a -r at the beginning, regexes that would work in any other program may not in Sed.
Sadly I get more mileage out of Sed and Tr than any general-purpose text processing language(Perl) for batch processing text.
I haven't thought of that for years. When I was doing my masters I actually TAed a class (CS for non-majors) for one of the creators of MUMPS and used that language for the labs. It was sort of hilarious learning it and trying to help newbies use it.
Can't complain too much since he gave me a very generous letter of recommendation.
To be fair, the point of Brainfuck was about interpreter size: the idea was to create an interpreter that could fit in 256 bytes or less of 68000 assembly language. Brainfuck and its ilk (and I'd include Malbolge/Dis in that) are simply just a branch of esoteric language: the minimalist languages. Intercal is in the weird family. Then you've the likes of Befunge, Q-BAL, and *W, and most of the stuff Chris Pressey has done over the years, which are in the experimental family.
It's gotta be similar to the difference between esoteric art in a large museum, and esoteric art in a small gallery the size of a closet. Sometimes you get so far out in your studies that you can't even realize the people around you don't have the faintest clue of even how to get to your headspace, let alone understand it. There's esoteric languages that look different, but still follow some standardization of language, then there is esoteric that questions every standard convention through the realization of the absurd.
For added lulz, you might want to look into CLC-INTERCAL, a dialect that introduces it's own unique take on object orientation, internationalization, and quantum operations.
(EDIT: I forgot to add, CLC-INTERCAL also introduced the computed COME FROM statement. It was originally written in Perl, but subsequently became self-hosting, or maybe self-infesting ...)
Of course, it has extensive documentation by way of a support gopher site:
Speaking as the original author of both of those documents (and a significant fraction of all INTERCAL code), I can affirm that I have INTERCAL on my resume. It's only come up once in an interview, sadly. Someday someone will ask me to write INTERCAL on the whiteboard....
For years I developed in a language called Sigmac, for the Arris CAD system. I love esoteric languages, but Sigmac was downright hateful. It made you feel like the company was punishing you for daring to use it.
Some of the great "features" of the language:
* It has no scope. None. Everything is a global. Which it uses to great advantage because
* Functions can't return values! If you want to make a string uppercase, for instance, you would first store that string in the smn_transfer global variable, then call the function :j_caps, then read the smn_transfer string.
Fortunately it had a working syscall system, so I did as much of my work as I could in an accompanying script written in a much saner language, like Perl.
You mean just like "the worst programming language ever"? Because I actually think the title should be "BS: The Worst Programming Language Ever" because it isn't really about Intercal but his made up language BS.
I like the compiler hitting the website to download the registered characters and if no internet access is available "making it appear to be your fault"
Spoiler: I'm waiting for the release where block comments are added, which is just anything between two lines consisting of 5 spaces. That has to be one of the most psychotically evil ideas I've seen since #define TRUE FALSE.
The only improvement I would suggest is to use \r\n instead. Version control is mentioned, and if this is used, git will happily do some incredible things to the code for compatibility reasons.
This is really a good way of approaching computer science theory of programming language. For example, i remembered there was something really nasty with javascript closures, and was surprised he didn't mention it. Then i went and look at what it was really that sometimes bugged me, and just realized it was just a combination of heavy closure use together with function-level variable scope (rather than block based), that sometimes made you need to wrap the content of a for loop in an a anonymous function, just to capture the current state of the loop increment.
There's problems not just with Javascript closures but also with Groovy closures.
According to the Groovy devcon 2 report at http://javanicus.com/blog2/items/191-index.html "no agreement was reached on [...] whether we should have any syntax denoting the difference between a true lexical Closure and one of these Builder blocks. The historical reasons go back to Builder blocks looking just like Closures, and I'm afraid this long standing mistake must be removed from the language before any true progress can be made, as no sensible specification rules can be applied while the dichotomy exists. I headed back to London with a very disappointed James Strachan"
In Groovy language creator Strachan's last ever email on its mailing list 2 days later at http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Paris-write-up-tt395560.h... "Note that no other dynamic language I'm aware of has any concept of dynamic name resolution in the way you suggest; names are always statically bound to objects in a sensible way in all dynamic languages I'm aware of (lisp, smalltalk, python, ruby etc). I see no argument yet for why we have to throw away decades of language research and development with respect to name resolution across the language as a whole"
Very nice video, great use of slides as mentioned elsewhere.
In case someone was going to take encyclopaedic knowledge away from this, the Greek semi-colon is actually a mid-dot-like period character (not exactly mid-dot, as I think that's quite fat). And since we're on the subject, is no separate unicode "Greek questionmark" character, so you'll have a hard time compiling BS 1.0.
Although the fix is obvious - through the UTF256 character submission website ;)
Great talk. I love how pointing out all the horribleness of languages makes me realize there must be something better to be had. Now we just need a language that removes all the nonsense he describes (and can of course be programmed by Business folks!)
Using goto as the only loop construct is too easy, you can statically know where your code is going all the time. It would be more fun to use setjmp longjmp from C, where you can dynamically assign where a label is pointing to, and it works across scopes.
[+] [-] ajkjk|11 years ago|reply
It's common knowledge that reading off your slides is generally bad and makes for terrible presentation, but he does better than just avoiding that. The slides are always something he can look at at the end of a point, like a 'turn' of sorts. Sometimes it's to demonstrate what he's talking about; sometimes it's comic effect to show what he was referring but not by name before; sometimes it's a segue to a new heading that fills the beat after the previous one.
Not that 'giving good presentations' is so rare a skill that it needs to be called out, but, he's so consistently good about slide usage that I think his style is worth explicitly noting and copying.
[+] [-] pjmlp|11 years ago|reply
Just some key points or diagrams that help to explain the presentation.
The moment the audience can read everything the presenter is about to tell, it is the end of the presentation.
As part of the audience, such presentations full with text are the ones where my brain switches off.
[+] [-] iopq|11 years ago|reply
It also lacks the header files of C, as seen by the fact that there wasn't a header file posted for the example.
If it wasn't clearly satire, this language would actually have fans and apologists. "Why do you care about the greek question mark? It's a European language, use the preprocessor to replace it why any character you want, it's that flexible!"
[+] [-] boomlinde|11 years ago|reply
To INTERCALs defense, the only thing I can say is that it's at least a good joke.
[+] [-] larssorenson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterfirefly|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
sed also takes some getting used to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed
Many modern languages sort of have 'DO COME FROM' in the form of exceptions. Having to execute PLEASE regularly (but not too often) is not that different from a buggy version of Oracle PL/SQL I had to use once, where single-line comments sometimes made the next line be ignored as well. Or a research language called Emerald for which the implementation needed extra comments or dummy statements to make the compiler not crash + the garbage collector was buggy so you needed to create and manipulate dummy objects Just So to make the garbage collector throw /them/ away instead of the ones you actually cared about.
I'd say the only unique aspects of Intercal are the stupid numbers and the delightfully twisted way they added threads to it (by having more than one DO COME FROM statement with the same label).
[+] [-] jschwartzi|11 years ago|reply
Sadly I get more mileage out of Sed and Tr than any general-purpose text processing language(Perl) for batch processing text.
[+] [-] qhfgva|11 years ago|reply
Can't complain too much since he gave me a very generous letter of recommendation.
[+] [-] slashnull|11 years ago|reply
And also why I cry when people create languages that are one simple regex away from brainfuck and call those esoteric.
Soo also: Malbolge, so evil that the only non-stupid programs in it were generated by LISP scripts
[+] [-] talideon|11 years ago|reply
It's a broad church.
[+] [-] drcomputer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] penguat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cstross|11 years ago|reply
(EDIT: I forgot to add, CLC-INTERCAL also introduced the computed COME FROM statement. It was originally written in Perl, but subsequently became self-hosting, or maybe self-infesting ...)
Of course, it has extensive documentation by way of a support gopher site:
http://clc.intercal.org.uk/
[+] [-] cdibona|11 years ago|reply
http://cadie.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/INTERCAL-style-guide.h...
And a small script:
https://code.google.com/p/cadie/source/browse/trunk/CADIE.I
I could put intercal on the resume because of this...not that I did or will, but I could...
[+] [-] breadbox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zikes|11 years ago|reply
Some of the great "features" of the language:
* It has no scope. None. Everything is a global. Which it uses to great advantage because
* Functions can't return values! If you want to make a string uppercase, for instance, you would first store that string in the smn_transfer global variable, then call the function :j_caps, then read the smn_transfer string.
Fortunately it had a working syscall system, so I did as much of my work as I could in an accompanying script written in a much saner language, like Perl.
[+] [-] muyuu|11 years ago|reply
Nostalgia overdrive just seeing this beauty:
http://www.rskey.org/CMS/index.php/7?manufacturer=Casio&mode...
[+] [-] cowardlydragon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mseepgood|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamnemecek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spain|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linksbro|11 years ago|reply
Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here."
[+] [-] Flimm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Poopoodeepoo|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] azeirah|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larssorenson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HCIdivision17|11 years ago|reply
The only improvement I would suggest is to use \r\n instead. Version control is mentioned, and if this is used, git will happily do some incredible things to the code for compatibility reasons.
[+] [-] onion2k|11 years ago|reply
What's wrong with Prolog? Oh, wait, he meant Perl. ;)
[+] [-] joshschreuder|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsaul|11 years ago|reply
Really interesting talk.
[+] [-] vorg|11 years ago|reply
According to the Groovy devcon 2 report at http://javanicus.com/blog2/items/191-index.html "no agreement was reached on [...] whether we should have any syntax denoting the difference between a true lexical Closure and one of these Builder blocks. The historical reasons go back to Builder blocks looking just like Closures, and I'm afraid this long standing mistake must be removed from the language before any true progress can be made, as no sensible specification rules can be applied while the dichotomy exists. I headed back to London with a very disappointed James Strachan"
In Groovy language creator Strachan's last ever email on its mailing list 2 days later at http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Paris-write-up-tt395560.h... "Note that no other dynamic language I'm aware of has any concept of dynamic name resolution in the way you suggest; names are always statically bound to objects in a sensible way in all dynamic languages I'm aware of (lisp, smalltalk, python, ruby etc). I see no argument yet for why we have to throw away decades of language research and development with respect to name resolution across the language as a whole"
[+] [-] yourad_io|11 years ago|reply
In case someone was going to take encyclopaedic knowledge away from this, the Greek semi-colon is actually a mid-dot-like period character (not exactly mid-dot, as I think that's quite fat). And since we're on the subject, is no separate unicode "Greek questionmark" character, so you'll have a hard time compiling BS 1.0.
Although the fix is obvious - through the UTF256 character submission website ;)
[+] [-] cbd1984|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BANCStar_programming_language
https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar
[+] [-] binarymax|11 years ago|reply
Great talk. I love how pointing out all the horribleness of languages makes me realize there must be something better to be had. Now we just need a language that removes all the nonsense he describes (and can of course be programmed by Business folks!)
[+] [-] greiskul|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abandonliberty|11 years ago|reply
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck