#Computer programming

[theinternetarchive]

snoopy used as an example of a character generated by the hal pcg 6500, advertised in compute! magazine, september/october 1980.

[foone]

So a cool thing my granddad* Alan Turing figured out is Turing Equivalence:

Basically he designed a super simple hypothetical computer, and proved mathematically that it can do everything a more complicated computer can do, just maybe slower or faster.

This is normally brought up for the factoid that could run Doom on Xty Million Crabs, but it also applies to programming languages, not just computers.

See, it means that every programming language is equally "powerful", assuming it's Turing Complete (which is basically just "can do the things this minimal computer can do", which is basically every language except a couple simple theming languages and macro scripting systems), it's just easier or harder to do specific things in a given language. But they can still be done.

So this means the C/C++ your OS and browser was written in is just as powerful as everything else. The Java used for Minecraft and Android phones, the Javascript used for webpages, the C# used Unity, the BASIC used on 80s computers, and DickCode, the joke programming language I made as a university student which had only eight operators, but all eight were different ascii penises a la "8==D".

All equally powerful. You could write an OS, video game, or AI bot in any of these. It just might be a little slower or faster and easier or harder to do (especially DickCode, that one is very Hard).

Aren't computers neat?

*not my actual granddad but I am named Turing

[thewitchoftherock]

This woman is Dr. Grace Murray Hopper. She created the first computer language compiler tools to program the Harvard Mark I computer. This computer was used in WWII after 1944. John von Neumann initiated the computer's first program, but Hopper invented the codes

[bobauthorman]

_Incoming_software_transmission_detected_

_Commencing_download_

_Installing_PENNYAI.EXE_

...

_WARNING_

_UNAUTHORIZED_PROGRAM_DETECTED_

_wattsroolzironwoodroolz.virus.exe_loaded_and_running_

_Running_anti_virus_software_

_wattsroolzironwoodroolz.virus.exe_contained_and_isolated _

_Following_files_corrupted:_

_obeyironwood.protocol.exe_

_ironwoodisgreat.protocol.exe_

_makenofriends.protocol.exe_

_delete_corrupted_files?

_yes_

_corrupted_files_and_wattsroolzironwoodroolz.virus.exe_deleted_

_PENNYAI.exe_installed_

_now_running_PENNYAI.exe_

ALERT_

_insufficient_memory_

_Delete_unnecessary_files?

_no_

compress_files?

_yes_

_datafile_RubyRosememories.DAT_compressed_

_datafile_goodtimez.DAT_compressed_

_datafile_badtimez.DAT_compressed_

_datafile_friendz.DAT_compressed_

_datafile_enemies.DAT_compressed

_initiate_program_

_now_running_PENNYAI.exe_

_SAL_U_TATIONS_

_alert_

_hardware_damage_detected_

_initiate_repairs?

_yes_

_auto.repair_initatiated_

_please_wait_

_system_running_

_decompress_file:_

_datafile_RubyRosememories.DAT_

[noizepushr]

There are three types of coding bugs:

1. Oopsie! I messed up that syntax! Silly me, let me fix up that typo

2. Oh god I never concidered this scenario I’m going to need to do so much work in order to account for it and fix this oversight fuck me

3. Where the fuck is it?!?!?! I cannot concieve of a way this could have gone wrong and neither have all ten of my peers. A phantasm has possessed my code and will not leave

[savagegardensprogramming]

The Purpose of Language in General

I found that Language has three important uses is our every day life.

(1) The first one is obvious. Language as means of communication. We use language to communicate our ideas and desires to other people. duh!

(2) The second one is more subtle but also just as important. Language as means of articulating thought. We use language to construct and hold ideas together. Even if we do not like talking to people, language is incredibly important.

Ferrel children are children who grew in the wild with no access to human upbringing. These children are mentally handicapped and I believe this is largely due to lack of language. 10,000 years ago our brains where primitive but not very different from today. My personal hunch is that crude language skills leads to crude thinking. Thats how we got by in those days. And that is the difference between us modern humans and humans 10,000 years ago.

There are people who do not have an inner monologue yet they are very intelligent. I would bet that these people still have some sort of mechanism similar to language that allows them to articulate thought. Its based on other brain machinery such as vision and emotion.

(3) The third one was pointed out by a colleague. Language is a window to outside observation. We don't have to be involved in the conversation to understand what other people are talking about and learn from them. Documentation important also. History is preserved by written language. Only after written language did humanity started to thrive.

Sooo, what does language have to do with computer science, you may wonder. Well, programming languages are real languages. My claim is that programming is a communications problem. I see the machine as an alien species from ourselves. And the task at hand is to find a way to communicate to them and inform them what we want them to do.

(1) The first aspect (the obvious one) of programming languages is to do just that. We need to communicate to the machine what we want them to do.

(2) The second aspect (the more subtle one but just as important) of programming languages is for our sake to understand what we are telling the machine. We use programming languages to articulate ideas in our head before typing it on the computer. That is why we insist and persist on using JSON and XML to store data. Even thou those formats are incredibly inefficient from the view point of a machine.

(3) The third aspect of programming languages is a form of documentation. Other people can understand what the programmer is telling the machine. Its why open source is popular among programmers.

[bynux]

/* Filename: Discipline.scala */ for (i <- 1 to 1000) { println( f"$i%4d: I will not use code to cheat." ); } // >:3

[imlovelace]

i started to do some programming stuff (at least i'm trying) for my department which i'm going to study this year. HOPE IT GOES WELL.

[basic-retro-programming]

Programmieren in Basic: Computergeschichte

Post #309: Heimcomputermuseum.de, Programmieren in Basic, Ein Streifzug durch die Computergeschichte, 2024.

[nando161mando]

[hotfudgecherryrosy]

Hi! Little update on the Quizlet-like app, henceforth known and tagged as Innaflash. (One of my friend's ideas, and I'm a sucker for puns :) )

Tl;dr of below is i'd like opinions on the UI mockup so far, maybe some alternative color theme ideas.

No coding has happened yet, but I started making a UI mockup to get the brain juices going and also bc i just love messing around with color themes and graphic design, hee hee. I think I'm going with a webcore theme. Default will be purple, but there will be the option to change the theme (i already have the code for this so it's easy to implement). A couple images are above, I'd like to hear what you all think :)

[thelonelybluejay]

3/10/2025 - B-Sides Progress

Goal: start putting together the music journal in Godot

Notes: I had so much trouble with importing the Flutter package into VSCode that I had to switch to a whole other way to code this project. Off to a great start!

Reflection: I'm writing this reflection a week later, but I think godot is definitely giving me a lot more room to do what I need to. I have some basic UI right now that I need to write some code for, and then the "journal" section will be done. All in all, I'm optomistic.

[michaelgogins]

Barry Vercoe (24 July 1937 – 16 June 2025)

I will not recapitulate what others have said in tribute to Barry Vercoe. You can read the Wikipedia article, or Richard Boulanger’s tribute (which is quoted in full here), or look at Barry’s old home page at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or read his New Zealand obituary.

Here I will offer my personal thanks to Barry for creating what, in my considered opinion, is one of the best musical instruments in history — Csound. I use it for almost all of my musical compositions.

There are now other systems, such as Max or Supercollider, that can do all, or almost all, of what Csound does. However, Csound came first, and is an ancestor of these systems. For at least some composers, such as myself, Csound is still easier to use, and perhaps more powerful. And just because it is older, Csound has the huge advantage of a very large base of running musical examples and pieces.

Here I will also offer my appreciation of Barry’s design choices and his implementation of Csound. My appreciation is based on my own experience, not only as an intensive user, but also as a sometime member of the Csound development team, when I contributed a number of features to Csound and came to understand Barry’s outstanding ability as a computer programmer.

There are some things I definitely do not like about the Csound code, mainly the cryptic names, and the use of preprocessor macros. Aside from that, here are a few of the good things in Barry’s code:

Of course the big home run was writing Csound in platform-neutral C, still the most performant programming language, and still available on more platforms than any other.

The extreme simplicity and efficiency of the inner loop for running Csound performances.

Invisible, automatic handling of multiple notes playing at the same time, for the same instrument.

The extremely flexible design for unit generators (opcodes), the building blocks of sound synthesis. Essentially, although written in C, Barry’s unit generators are classes -- data structures that derive from a virtual base class, and include methods for operating on their own data. The virtual base class idea makes it quite easy to extend Csound with new unit generators, and now even plugin unit generators.

The musical power and flexibility of Csound’s score language, which permits the user to define any set of fields for an event; and these fields are not limited to integer values, but are real numbers. Furthermore, based on his experience as a composer, Barry made sure his score language could handle tied notes, polyphony, changes of tempo, and so on. This is far more powerful than MIDI.

The policy of complete backwards compatibility. The very first examples and compositions still run on today's Csound!

Based on Barry's foundation, the current implementation of Csound (far more capable than the original) remains highly efficient, flexible, and easy to extend.

[fanficclub]

This one is just funny, in today's climate:

"Women are 'naturals' at computer programming." 🙃

Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez, 2019

[ihavenomoralsss]

Python is such a cool name for something that’s actually terrible and mean