Jonathan Mast wrote:
> 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 ;-)
Best read Diamond's follow-on book Collapse before proceeding further :-)
--Ken
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
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