[SunRescue] multics is dead, long live multics!

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Tue, 22 May 2001, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> I never liked PL/1 either.  Far too complex.  They say Ada's bad for
> being designed by a committee, but PL/1 was designed by an IBM committee!

I kinda liked ADA, and according to more than one FAQ, it isn't actually
designed by a commitie.  I only learned enough Ada to help some students
with home work.  I've never done any real projects in it.  I'd like to,
but I haven't worked on any where it would be appropriate (OpenGL support
seems to be missing.  Bit banging audio is definately wrong.  If there
were XML and wxWindow bindings, I might try it instead of python for some
stuff, but there aren't those bindings).  

Recently I've also spent time working in smalltalk and lisp (and scheme).
I really like some of the "old" languages.  Smalltalk is rather productive
(I'm using it for development I'm being paid to do for the palm pilot).
Lisp is pretty cool to, but for reasons similar to why I haven't done much
with Ada, I haven't done much with Lisp, other than write some minor math
stuff in it.  Scheme is the really stretching language though.  I'm still
trying to figure out how to create variables in it (probably just looking
at the wrong documents).  It has no loop mechanism other than recursion.
Wooowe.

Another language I want to spend some time with is forth.  Maybe (when 
my SS2 comes) I'll try being one of those weirdo's who write OSs from
scratch for Sun computers using only the boot monitor. ;)

--
Joshua Boyd