Part 30 is here Languages I haven’t used — well maybe glanced at, but never actually used are: Rust # If I ever wanted to go back to writing things in C again I maybe tempted to learn Rust (or the next language below) instead, on the assumption that it has the library support that I need. I Don’t really see this happening anytime soon, but it’s an option. NB: I did get as far as a “Hello, World!”…
Part 29 is here This is the start of the wrap up of everything else that I have either played with, avoided or skipped over. ICON # Long ago I experimented with a language that fully supported data pipelining - the language was designed just for this purpose. Like Unix Pipes and Socket Streams you could pipe the output of one function to the input of another. The second function would block…
Part 28 is here This entry has been a long time coming. I had hope that I could find a way of writing the post in a more exciting way than the boringness that are “Computer Languages”, well to me at least and it wouldn’t turn into a rant. So, without further waffling… drum roll please…. 29. JavaScript # I first came across this language in its very early days. Probably in the Netscape browser,…
Part 27 is here After Apple (or rather the HyperCard team) invented HyperTalk enabling novice users to program they went a step further with… 28. AppleScript # AppleScript was influenced by HyperTalk. Like the predecessor it is “natural language” based, loosely typed scripting but with a more object oriented data model. It was part of the operating system and could be used to control other…
Part 26 is here I overlooked an important milestone in programing, not just for me but for a lot of people and that was an event that happened back in 1987. 27. HyperTalk # HyperTalk was used to program HyperCard stacks . In a lot of ways it was the fore-runner to the World Wide Web and is cited as the idea and design that lead to the Wiki concept. Created by Bill Atkinson of QuickDraw fame and…
Part 25 is here When I learnt PHP to build my first dynamic web-site I needed a database to store the login credentials and users purchases in. This is when I learnt about the LAMP Stack , AKA: L inux , A pache , M ySQL , P HP . 26. MySQL # I hosted on a shared Linux server running Apache coding in PHP so MySQL was the missing piece and a Database; just what I was looking for. I brought a book -…
Part 23 is here Anytime I am involved with computer software, no matter the high-level language being used; eventually I end up writing assembler. It happened with BASIC and Z80, BASIC and 6502, Algol and MACRO-10, C and 680x0. Programming on the new PowerPC Macintoshes wasn’t going to be an exception. 24. PowerPC Assembler # The PowerPC processor was a change of architecture for Apple. This was…
Part 24 is here No more Assembler Language articles, promise. I started using the web around 1998 and as an engineer immediately learnt HTML and created some static web pages. A few of years later I needed to create dynamic web sites. Ones that allowed users to login with different content displayed depending on the user and which “features” they had paid for. I knew this must be possible, Amazon…
Part 22 is here Shortly after I was exposed to Unix (first on a Dec Vax 11/750, then a Sun Workstation, then many more *nix based machines), of the many many tools you learn, you have to learn… 23. Shell Script # The Unix Shell (or shells) have their own language, generally referred to as “ Shell Script ”. I say shells because there are so many of them, from the original Bourne Shell (sh), the C…
Part 21 is here Almost everything I was writing at this point was in an Object Oriented style using C++ on macOS. A couple of things meant that I needed to go back down to a lower-level. Don’t get me wrong, optimizing C compilers by this point were very good and almost everything could be written in C. There were a couple of situations where C wasn’t going to cut it, which meant I had to learn.…