> Had to take a quick break from the docs to regain sanity, so wrote this
insanely fun demo script that I thought you might enjoy.
Cool! (and very inspirational!) It's so easy for me to forget that so much
cool stuff can be done with so little code when you have the right language
and infrastructure behind you. I remember watching Benoit @ Be write some
fun little demos in as little as 20 lines of C++ code for BeOS, and I
thought that was amazing at the time, but in a coding shootout against Carl
and REBOL, I know who I'd place my bets on! :-) No offense, Benoit, if you
ever find this message in the list archive, you're still a coding god but
C++ vs. REBOL I think would prove too big of a handicap for you! :-)
Speaking of coding shootouts, you know why the ACM Collegiate Programming
Contest (www.acm.org/contest) only allows C, C++, Pascal, and (in the finals
only, due to Microsoft sponsorship) Visual Basic, and not languages like
Perl? Because, it's common knowledge that in schoolwide competitions (often
held by universities to choose the students to represent the school at the
ACM competition), whenever the judges have allowed languages like Perl, the
students who use it tend to win by huge margins (in other words have an
"unfair advantage") over the students struggling with C/C++. When you're
trying to solve six non-trival problems in five hours, struggling with
printf() and strtok() (or iostreams) is *not* want you want to be doing! :)
And REBOL should be even *better* at this than Perl, right? If only it had
been around when I was in college.. because I never really liked Perl, ya
know, and I was tired of always coming in second at the local contest to the
resident Perl god.. ;)
-Jake
