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I have been writing programs for computers since 1966. I started out in the summer of 1966 with FORTRAN II on a GE Timesharing system in the US (at Rogers Corporation), and continued during my studies and Ph. D. work with FORTRAN IV and assembler (COMPASS) on Control Data Corporation machines until 1973. It seems that Fortran (as it is now called) is still alive (see Fortran FAQ and this Fortran page)! I have a (passing) acquaintance with such languages as LISP, Algol60, Algol68, BCPL, Coral66, Bliss, and PL/I. The page Historic Documents in Computer Science is a good starting point for original material about many of these languages, and much, much more. I have been involved in the design and standardisation of two programming languages: CHILL for ITU and Ada for USDoD (see also AdaIC and Ada Home: the Home of the Brave Ada Programmers). I last programmed professionally in COBOL for DEC VAX from 1980 to 1982. Since then, I have only programmed s a recreation, initially using Turbo Pascal, then BASIC and Visual Basic on PCs and also OPL on the Psion 3/3a. More recently, I have started to write “serious” programs for Windows, in relation to my various interests: programming language interpretation, linguistics, the game of bridge. From 2004, these projects were using the Euphoria language, which has many interesting properties (besides being in the public domain): it is simple and consistent in its handling of data structures and types, and very efficient in execution. What I liked in particular about its design is the trade-off between security and efficiency. Then, a few years later, I discovered REBOL, and was immediately won over. It has a radically different design from almost all other languages that I know, combining a vast array of features with a (perhaps deceptively) simple syntax for representing instructions as well as data. The language is reflective to a high degree: almost all “program” elements can be manipulated as data, and functions and objects can be interrogated as to their definition. As a consequence of its design, REBOL is capable of being interpreted very efficiently. Implementations exist for a great many platforms. I use it both on Windows XP and on Linux. I have written up my appreciation of the language in an article which also contains a working program. The current version REBOL 2 is to be followed by a thorough redesign: REBOL 3. As of 2009, I have been actively contributing to its testing and finalization. Meanwhile, a related effort: Red Language is underway, and I am also contributing to that development, which — in contrast to REBOL 3 — is conducted in a completely open manner (visit my github profile). I have also started to develop dynamic pages for websites, using a variety of techniques: Server Side Includes, Javascript, PHP and Perl. Programming is as much an art as it is a science; Donald Knuth’s epoch-making book series is not called “The Art of Computer Programming” for nothing. Within the arts, programming is of course most closely related to literature, hence the notion of literate programming (for resources visit this website). |
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