

Programming with Nothing (2011) - throwaway344
http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing

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rzendacott
I love articles like this! They're a very fun exercise in what you /really/
need to have a programming language. Here's another one:
[http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/03/list-out-of-
lambda/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/03/list-out-of-lambda/)

It's in JavaScript for those who prefer JS over Ruby (although for the
purposes of the exercise the language choice doesn't matter much).

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Schwolop
I feel like I must have progressed as a programmer somewhat. Even though I
doubt I could write an article like this from scratch, I can now at least
follow it, and there are no more "wtf did he do there?" leaps of logic.

Post this again in a decade, and we'll see how I fare then...

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seanmcdirmid
There is nothing new in this article. They basically just did the untyped
lambda calculus in Ruby; Landin already had everything worked out in the 60s!
To write a similar article, just find a cool idea from the past, and then port
the idea to some current technology so that readers can better empathize with
it.

~~~
dkarapetyan
Yup, there is almost nothing new under the sun. Everything I use in my day to
day job was discovered in the 70s. Heck, half this stuff is even worse than
what was discovered in the 70s. SmallTalk was a complete OS/programming
environment with checkpoints, pausing, and live migration. What do we have now
that comes close?

~~~
tachyonbeam
Granted that what we have now often seems like a pile of kludges. Probably
because our modern systems evolved "organically" over a span of decades, and
technical issues have been solved with compromises rather than careful
planning

...However, I'm pretty sure if you booted up a SmallTalk machine from the 70s,
you'd find there were A LOT of bugs and unfinished corners. The UI was really
not polished or user friendly. The impression I got is that they barely had it
working, that it was more of a tech demo than any kind of finished product. I
don't think you'd want to trade any of your modern software for something from
then. I mean, yes, they thought of clever things back in the 70s, but don't go
imagining they had some nice, clean, perfect implementation of those ideas.

~~~
dkarapetyan
Sure, cutting edge stuff is always going to be rough around the edges but I
see no such boldness around me any more. All I see is another version of
AngularJS popping up every other week. How many MVC frameworks does a
JavaScript developer need?

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spiralganglion
The video is wonderful - one of my longtime favourite talks.

