
Dave Shields, the programmer maintaining SPITBOL - dorsatum
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-70-year-old-programmer-is-preserving-an-ancient-coding-language-on-github
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vzaliva
I was lucky to work a little with Dave on JIKES project and I was very
impressed by both his professional and human skills. I am glad to hear about
his new old project and wish him very good luck with it!

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sergers
Previous discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103276)

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andreaferretti
For those who want to try it in a more modern context, there is this recent
port of spitbol patterns for Nim:
[https://github.com/Henry/Nimbol](https://github.com/Henry/Nimbol)

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dang
It's great to see this work receiving more attention. If anyone starts using
it, I hope you'll post about it to HN.

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kwhitefoot
Interesting. At last I found a reason to read about SNOBOL. Looks like it some
interesting features. I particularly like the conditional jump on success or
failure.

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101914
I guess journalists read HN looking for stories? I was suprised to spitbol
mentioned on HN and now there is a story on Vice news?

Alas, the interviewer asked no technical, interesting questions. There is a
portable assembly language called MINIMAL that is used in spitbol. This could
be a topic for an entire story itself.

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kbenson
IIRC there have been prior submissions of Vice stories where the author has
jumped into the discussion here to clarify things, so at _least_ one of them
is familiar with the site. It doesn't seem too far fetched that HN submissions
may generate the occasional interest in a story if the author happens to check
in occasionally (or more).

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corndoge
Is it just me, or is there no scrollbar on this article?

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cosarara97
I do see a scrollbar, running firefox on linux.

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cosarara97
Slightly offtopic, but is 'Coding Language' now a thing?

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gamegoblin
Eh, I assume to non-technical readers, "coding" == "programming", therefore
"coding language" == "programming language". It sounds funny to us, because we
usually use "programming language" or just "language", but "coding language"
makes sense, I guess.

~~~
jMyles
I guess this is pretty off-topic, but I kinda always thought it was
unreasonable to regard a "high-level language" as also a "programming"
language. If the idea is that it's made for humans-first-computers-second,
then it's not really a "programming" language so much as a language that
computers happen to be able to understand.

I mean, by this definition, since computers are getting good are parsing
English, isn't English a "programming" language?

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DasIch
The entire purpose of a programming language is that everything written in it
describes an unambigiously executable process.

English isn't and never will be a programming language, no matter how much
computers will be able to comprehend.

~~~
TuringTest
That's only one possible interpretation of computing. The field of semiotics
applied to programming has interesting uses where a program needs not be
unambiguous to be useful.

It's true that the underlying hardware platform will necessarily work as a
deterministic sequence of steps executing a small set of primitives - but
building that sequence by hand in an unambiguous language is not necessarily
the only way to control the hardware; learning methods and evolutive
processes, vaguely directed from high-level goals stated in an ambiguous
model, is a possible alternative to the current industrial paradigm and might
become common in the future.

