> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to
> poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Dominic Fox
> Sent: 15 May 2005 12:33
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Cocooned in Dylanesque or is Albert Einstein indeed God?
>
> Prolog is the future.
??? Or mmm???
> Forth isn't dead, but has gone undercover; I believe it is
> still in use in embedded systems, where its
> small-and-lightness-fu is much appreciated.
Oh yes... Reverse polish notation & all that. Never really mastered forth
(maybe an inhibition related to Eric)
>
> A successor to Fortan is in the works, called Fortress - it
> seems that scientific/mathematical programming still needs a
> domain language all of its own. And COBOL obstinately refuses
> to die - possibly the signal from its hind-quarters has yet
> to reach its brain; or maybe it's like one of the Dark Judges
> (Judge Rigor Mortis, say), hissing "foolssss!
> you cannot kill what doesss not liiive!"
Wasn't cobble almost entirely single-handedly responsible for the millennium
bug scare? (almost came out as 'millenium but care', that line)
>
> (still-going? Lisp) evaluates to T.
>
> Computer science is still a young field, and the culture of
> programming languages is still a young culture - Alan Kay
> compared it recently to the consumer culture marketed at adolescents:
> exploitative and fad-driven, fuelled by the amnesiac
> repackaging and recycling of old ideas. C# is like Coldplay:
> nothing you haven't heard before, but nicely put-together.
>
Really it isn't, now; computer language is in its third human generation,
which means a whole lot of engrained assumptions about how to do things that
conflict with the ideology of the early days of computing, when folk assumed
that the next year's innovations would totally overwrite the previous
year's. Programming culture has come to resemble oral culture rather more
closely than Dominic may assume.
P
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