Back around 1968, I did some work on an IBM 1130 (small-scale 16-bit computer, definitely not a minicomputer, as it filled most of a room). The disk drive was driven by a voice coil, and made an audible click as the…
I use Tk routinely in Scheme; there is no Tcl in my code, but Tk is a very nice (though basic) GUI kit, and my programs work on Linux, BSD, MacOS, and Windows. Other commenters have mentioned that Python ships with…
I have nothing to say on the merits of Khan Academy (I have never looked at it, nor have I known anyone taking a course), but from 35 years of teaching, I know that we mostly learn by doing. It's why university courses…
A correction. I can find no evidence of a Unix v2 at Berkeley, it looks like it was v4. (I was told long ago by someone who was at Berkeley then that they had had v2, but there is no evidence of this in the usual…
My vague recollection is that the kernel in Unix v2 (still called UNIX in those days) was written in assembly language, but that many of the commands were written in B. Because B was interpretive on the PDP-11 (it…
s/dark side/far side/
I tried to use Vim once, and found that none of the Emacs keybindings worked there. Seriously, learning x86 assembly language is easier than trying to grasp that INSANELY bad keyboard layout.
I would never buy a kit that required soldering, because I'm terrible at it. But I like putting things together. I've assembled a couple of DIY keyboards, and I bought a Framework 12 laptop. It doesn't take too long…
er, no, it was licensed, but available to educational institutions. I remember having to send Bell Labs our university calendar when i wanted to get a copy of LSI-11 Unix circa 1976. What is true is that Ken Thompson…
There are 2 more that I would add, both books I read as an undergraduate nearly 60 years ago. First, Marvin Minsky's Computation: Finite And Infinite Machines (published 60 years ago). Not the latest word in automata…
There are a number of image-based Scheme systems. Chibi Scheme and Chez Scheme come to mind. In both, you can save an image and reload it at a later time, though for very good reasons, most people start each session…
I for one really appreciate Caps Lock. I always remap it as Compose.
SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someone learning Scheme. (But SICP will turn…
Until the threat of anti-trust against IBM, and the latter's decision to “unbundle” its software from its hardware, in 1969. There had been proprietary software before that, but very little horizontal software (OSs,…
I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way multiple inheritance in C++ game code).…
I have no opinion on the validity of this claim, but I do know that many students do not read things. I taught university level computer science for over 30 years. On midterms, I would embed phrases such as “print OKAPI…
One of the best labs I ever did in university (this was circa 1970), was to create an Initial Program Load (bootstrap) program for a virtual IBM System/360, which copied punch cards, using no OS assistance. (Modern…
Tk without Tcl?
Burgess reputedly disliked the American edition's inclusion of a glossary. I'm in partial agreement with that.The right way to read it is to let the language flow over you, and you gradually start making sense of it.…
I second the recommmendation, for these two systems with a caveat. MIT Scheme has not been made to run on Apple Silicon, though with a few tricks, the amd64 version is usable on a modern Mac (this will presumably go…
I always got a chuckle when Stargate went meta. They had a planet called Kelowna (a real BC city) and a country called Langara (I was for a time a faculty member at Langara College). At one point, they visit an Oregon…
Tectonic would be more convincing if the authors wrote their documentation in LaTeX, rather than Markdown (and I do know about Pandoc).
I did that kind of thing when I first started using C (my attitude then was that C was fine, but it should have looked more like BCPL). I stopped after a short time.
That could well be, the article is still wrong.
I was puzzled by this claim, too. I think that the article is wrong, and that the code is written in HAL/S, a NASA-only language that sort of started off as a preprocessor to Fortran, though it has some PL/I-like…
Back around 1968, I did some work on an IBM 1130 (small-scale 16-bit computer, definitely not a minicomputer, as it filled most of a room). The disk drive was driven by a voice coil, and made an audible click as the…
I use Tk routinely in Scheme; there is no Tcl in my code, but Tk is a very nice (though basic) GUI kit, and my programs work on Linux, BSD, MacOS, and Windows. Other commenters have mentioned that Python ships with…
I have nothing to say on the merits of Khan Academy (I have never looked at it, nor have I known anyone taking a course), but from 35 years of teaching, I know that we mostly learn by doing. It's why university courses…
A correction. I can find no evidence of a Unix v2 at Berkeley, it looks like it was v4. (I was told long ago by someone who was at Berkeley then that they had had v2, but there is no evidence of this in the usual…
My vague recollection is that the kernel in Unix v2 (still called UNIX in those days) was written in assembly language, but that many of the commands were written in B. Because B was interpretive on the PDP-11 (it…
s/dark side/far side/
I tried to use Vim once, and found that none of the Emacs keybindings worked there. Seriously, learning x86 assembly language is easier than trying to grasp that INSANELY bad keyboard layout.
I would never buy a kit that required soldering, because I'm terrible at it. But I like putting things together. I've assembled a couple of DIY keyboards, and I bought a Framework 12 laptop. It doesn't take too long…
er, no, it was licensed, but available to educational institutions. I remember having to send Bell Labs our university calendar when i wanted to get a copy of LSI-11 Unix circa 1976. What is true is that Ken Thompson…
There are 2 more that I would add, both books I read as an undergraduate nearly 60 years ago. First, Marvin Minsky's Computation: Finite And Infinite Machines (published 60 years ago). Not the latest word in automata…
There are a number of image-based Scheme systems. Chibi Scheme and Chez Scheme come to mind. In both, you can save an image and reload it at a later time, though for very good reasons, most people start each session…
I for one really appreciate Caps Lock. I always remap it as Compose.
SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someone learning Scheme. (But SICP will turn…
Until the threat of anti-trust against IBM, and the latter's decision to “unbundle” its software from its hardware, in 1969. There had been proprietary software before that, but very little horizontal software (OSs,…
I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way multiple inheritance in C++ game code).…
I have no opinion on the validity of this claim, but I do know that many students do not read things. I taught university level computer science for over 30 years. On midterms, I would embed phrases such as “print OKAPI…
One of the best labs I ever did in university (this was circa 1970), was to create an Initial Program Load (bootstrap) program for a virtual IBM System/360, which copied punch cards, using no OS assistance. (Modern…
Tk without Tcl?
Burgess reputedly disliked the American edition's inclusion of a glossary. I'm in partial agreement with that.The right way to read it is to let the language flow over you, and you gradually start making sense of it.…
I second the recommmendation, for these two systems with a caveat. MIT Scheme has not been made to run on Apple Silicon, though with a few tricks, the amd64 version is usable on a modern Mac (this will presumably go…
I always got a chuckle when Stargate went meta. They had a planet called Kelowna (a real BC city) and a country called Langara (I was for a time a faculty member at Langara College). At one point, they visit an Oregon…
Tectonic would be more convincing if the authors wrote their documentation in LaTeX, rather than Markdown (and I do know about Pandoc).
I did that kind of thing when I first started using C (my attitude then was that C was fine, but it should have looked more like BCPL). I stopped after a short time.
That could well be, the article is still wrong.
I was puzzled by this claim, too. I think that the article is wrong, and that the code is written in HAL/S, a NASA-only language that sort of started off as a preprocessor to Fortran, though it has some PL/I-like…