> XML is really SGML ... with a twist. > I just finished reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, > tracking the historical movements of people via the similarities in > languages is very interesting.
And thus the new field of Comparative Historical Programming Language Studies is born ;-) On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 11:54 AM, David Fisher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> From: Peter Crowther [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >> Subject: [OT] Smalltalk (was RE: Tomcat multithread question > >> on externalapplication) > >> > >> Smalltalk is still the fastest prototyping environment for > >> some classes of problem that I've used - but I'd prefer > >> something with a few more safety belts for production use! > > > > Agreed; it definitely has its place (primarily as an OO teaching > > tool, I > > think), but things like that scare me when they escape into the real > > world. > > > > But then, one of the guys I worked with 30+ years ago wrote a > > production > > application in APL... and it stayed in production for several years. > > The son of the inventor of APL has made a career out of a proprietary > version of APL still used by at least one of the large financial > institutions in new york. The array functionality and compactness of > expression to say nothing of a whole set of unavailable non-ASCII > characters. Phew. > > I switch between Fortran and Java. We use a 44 year old Fortran 2 > heap sort implementation that is very fast. Our graphics libraries > have produced FR80 micrographics, Xerox metacode (saw John Warnock's > name on some hand written engineering specs someone gave us), > Macintosh PICT, and, finally, Postscript. Lately, we've engineered a > hook up to Excel and Powerpoint via contributions to Apache POI. > > In looking at the Apache XML Graphics project I see a bunch of > references to Knuth's layout algorithms, so I'm getting out my 29 > year old first edition of TEK and METAFONT. > > XML is really SGML ... with a twist. > > I just finished reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, > tracking the historical movements of people via the similarities in > languages is very interesting. > > Dave > > > > > - Chuck > > > > > > THIS COMMUNICATION MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL AND/OR OTHERWISE > > PROPRIETARY > > MATERIAL and is thus for use only by the intended recipient. If you > > received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the e- > > mail > > and its attachments from all computers. > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > To start a new topic, e-mail: users@tomcat.apache.org > > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To start a new topic, e-mail: users@tomcat.apache.org > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >
