Esoteric Programming - Useful or a Waste of Time?
-
-
If you can't dazzle em with brains baffle em with BS meaning that sometimes you get the bear and sometimes it gets you. :)
The problem with borrowing money from China is 30 mins. later you feel broke again.
Wise words indeed.
Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads
My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier - my favourite utility
-
Wise words indeed.
Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads
My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier - my favourite utility
Sorry in a bit of a philosophical mood this morning. :)
The problem with borrowing money from China is 30 mins. later you feel broke again.
-
Hello Everybody, Esoteric programming languages like those listed on the Esolang Wiki[^] are odd beasts indeed. But do you think they're a useful tool in exploring computing concepts, a bit of fun or a complete waste of time? I think they're a bit of fun and sometimes even a little educational myself, but what do you think? MrWolfy :-D
Waste of time. With few exceptions, I find the reasoning of "best tool for the job" to be specious and usually an excuse to use some new language just for the sake of it. The big mistake is forgetting that software must be sustained and hiring people who know esoteric languages isn't easy. I interviewed at a well known company for a Python position; I was the only engineer they'd interviewed who'd ever used it (and I'd only used it because some engineer at a previous company had pulled that "best tool" crap--his solution proved so problematic over time that I ended up rewriting his utility in very vanilla C++.) The only reason I didn't get the job is that the department was forced to take an internal transfer (who didn't know Python at all.) (This is also why I'm against using every fancy feature of a language unless it's absoutely necessary. It makes normal maintenance harder and also makes it harder to hire sustaining engineers for it. Reading other people's code can be very difficult, when they used esoteric techniques, it makes it worse. It also trips up optimizers and makes it's harder to find really obscure bugs.)
-
Waste of time. With few exceptions, I find the reasoning of "best tool for the job" to be specious and usually an excuse to use some new language just for the sake of it. The big mistake is forgetting that software must be sustained and hiring people who know esoteric languages isn't easy. I interviewed at a well known company for a Python position; I was the only engineer they'd interviewed who'd ever used it (and I'd only used it because some engineer at a previous company had pulled that "best tool" crap--his solution proved so problematic over time that I ended up rewriting his utility in very vanilla C++.) The only reason I didn't get the job is that the department was forced to take an internal transfer (who didn't know Python at all.) (This is also why I'm against using every fancy feature of a language unless it's absoutely necessary. It makes normal maintenance harder and also makes it harder to hire sustaining engineers for it. Reading other people's code can be very difficult, when they used esoteric techniques, it makes it worse. It also trips up optimizers and makes it's harder to find really obscure bugs.)
-
Hello Everybody, Esoteric programming languages like those listed on the Esolang Wiki[^] are odd beasts indeed. But do you think they're a useful tool in exploring computing concepts, a bit of fun or a complete waste of time? I think they're a bit of fun and sometimes even a little educational myself, but what do you think? MrWolfy :-D
Eh, I've been using VB.net for the last year. ::shrug::
-
You get what you pay for.
The problem with borrowing money from China is 30 mins. later you feel broke again.
-
Hello Everybody, Esoteric programming languages like those listed on the Esolang Wiki[^] are odd beasts indeed. But do you think they're a useful tool in exploring computing concepts, a bit of fun or a complete waste of time? I think they're a bit of fun and sometimes even a little educational myself, but what do you think? MrWolfy :-D
-
Hello Everybody, Esoteric programming languages like those listed on the Esolang Wiki[^] are odd beasts indeed. But do you think they're a useful tool in exploring computing concepts, a bit of fun or a complete waste of time? I think they're a bit of fun and sometimes even a little educational myself, but what do you think? MrWolfy :-D
Mostly waste of time. For every programming language that achieves some degree of success or notariety, there must be 100 that are silly thought experiments, academic masturbations, concept verifications, or just good ideas that didn't end up being as useful as the author thought. I developed two programming languages over my lifetime. One was a masters thesis project. Damn it looked a lot olke Java, but in 1980. Its VM wasn't fast enough on the hardware of the day to make it anything but a learning vehicle, and I made the disasterous mistake of trying assignments backwords, with the lvalue on the right of the equals sign. There's a reason the lvalue is on the left. The changed variable is the most important part of the assignment. I know that now. The second one I did on the job at Fluke in the late 1980s. It was commercially successful, in the sense that it went out the door on 1300 units of our board test product the 9100A. Nobody but me, my buddy, and my thesis advisor ever heard of NEST, and it is highly unlikely any more than anyone on this list ever saw TL/1. A single bound copy of my thesis is presumably still taking up space on a shelf in the library at the University of Washington if you're interested. And I have one that my wife had bound for me.
-
Hello Everybody, Esoteric programming languages like those listed on the Esolang Wiki[^] are odd beasts indeed. But do you think they're a useful tool in exploring computing concepts, a bit of fun or a complete waste of time? I think they're a bit of fun and sometimes even a little educational myself, but what do you think? MrWolfy :-D