Esoteric Programming - Useful or a Waste of Time?
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You get what you pay for.
The problem with borrowing money from China is 30 mins. later you feel broke again.
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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
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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.
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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
