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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3202 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 9, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Having primarily focused on C-style programming, getting into Logo was a mind-breaker. I could do things the way I did them in other languages by emulating one line of C as three lines of Logo, or I could do them more simply by thinking it through just a little bit more and doing them the proper Logo way. I was able to create a program I’ve been dreaming of for twenty years in two weeks with Logo.

So then I discovered Logo is a Lisp-style language minus some parentheses. Now I begin to see what people mean when they call Lisp the most elegant programming language on Earth. Writing C++ is like working with a compliant and obedient robot; writing Logo is like ballroom dancing with logic itself.

Maybe it's my autism, but I really love C programing. Anything else feels like I'm wearing oven mits or something.

I love the feeling of directly interfacing with the hardware C gives me; that I can actually understand what the compiler turns each line into. I love a 5000 line behemoth that took weeks to write and debug and test and rewrite and debug and restart from the beginning that I KNOW, for a fact, to be perfectly optimized for X.

That said, holy shit is it faster to write some stuff in lisp adjacent languages or clunky kludged together jank piles like python.

I love the feeling of directly interfacing with the hardware C gives me

Obligatory article: C Is Not a Low-Level Language

I will say most of the word in there are general attacks on all languages that aren't interpreted, and C and it's flavors are still closer to metal than all them and all it's competitors. Also, I challenge you to find anyone that has run one of the baked in concurrency languages dude talks about at work instead of with 5 year olds without looking like those before and after picks of obama.

That said, oof on memory. Just pretend your symbolic address is direct and go in blissful ignorance.

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