Guido van Rossum: Before Python

http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2011/07/before-python.html

by tathagatadg • 15 years ago

171 19 15 years ago

neopythonic.blogspot.com

breck• 15 years ago

> "But punch cards are the reason that some software still limits you (or just defaults) to 80 characters per line."

Neat. I had always wondered about this.

seiji• 15 years ago

Visually: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_per_line

derleth• 15 years ago

There were multiple punch card sizes and formats; some were as small as 45 and some as large as 96 columns. Eighty does seem to be the one everyone remembers.

kapranoff• 15 years ago

Actually, that's debatable. First, most 80 columns cards had the last 8 columns ignored (or used for metadata). Second, it is much more probable that 80 columns limit comes from 80x25 text resolution of EGA/VGA displays.

bdesimone2• 15 years ago

Guido punctuates with more emoticons than a 14 year old girl. :)

hardy263• 15 years ago

I almost laughed out loud at the part "Have you ever invented a programming language? :-)"

Off topic: It annoys me when people go "Oh you don't know this person? But they're so famous!" because not everyone knows all the famous people in every field.

middus• 15 years ago

And his use of parentheses is different than I expected:

(blabla :-) vs (blabla :-))

bdesimone2• 15 years ago

jedi_stannis• 15 years ago

Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/541/

lucian1900• 15 years ago

To me, he always seemed to be a very jolly person. After seeing and hearing him talk, I'm not very surprised by a lot of emoticons.

abecedarius• 15 years ago

"Pascal really had only one new feature compared to Algol-60, pointers." -- Well, records were pretty significant too.

16s• 15 years ago

I find these old computing stories fascinating. All programming luminaries should consider putting their history into books for us normal nerds to read ;)

erikpukinskis• 15 years ago

It's amazing how many programmers think that programming is going to look roughly the same 50 years from now. They imagine the transition from punch cards to text files was a one time thing... That from here on out it's just going to be more and more refined text languages.

I think history repeating itself, and programming becoming unrecognizably different, is much more likely.

But I've also come to terms that those who lack the imagination to start picturing such things aren't going to believe it until after it happens.

bergie• 15 years ago

I'm actually looking at taking programming beyond text by moving the control logic to graphs. The idea is based on the concept of Flow-Based Programming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming

It might be a misstep, as graphical programming has been tried before without much success. But I like the concept, and maybe new tools like multi-touch tablets finally make it viable.

calibraxis• 15 years ago

Flow-based programming is definitely something I'm (and some people I know) looking at. The coordination language idea is worthwhile for language-independence. And functional languages with lazy sequences are very similar.

kristianp• 15 years ago

Then again, aircraft have looked pretty much the same for the last 50 years. Maybe programming isn't going to change as drastically as it has in the past, when more experimenting was taking place. (I'm saying this semi-tongue in cheek, who can predict these things, really).

perfunctory• 15 years ago

> I realized that a pointer was just an address. Then I finally understood them.

This is quite interesting. It seems to be a universal pattern. Has anybody understood pointers without first understanding memory addressing?

Guido van Rossum: Before Python

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