Readit Newsgnufx commented on The next 700 programming languages dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/36... · Posted by u/gnufx
This hasn't been posted for two years and still deserves reading 60-ish years later.
gnufx commented on Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020) hillelwayne.com/post/infl... · Posted by u/azhenley
I've heard it was from Haskell?
Block structure as indentation was introduced in Landin's ISWIM. I think the first actual implementation was in Turner's SASL (part of the ancestry of Haskell). Note that Haskell doesn't have Python's ":" and it also has an alternative braces and semicolons block syntax.
Then, after successful debugging your job isn't finished. The outline of "Three Questions About Each Bug You Find" <http://www.multicians.org/thvv/threeq.html> is:
1. Is this mistake somewhere else also?
2. What next bug is hidden behind this one?
3. What should I do to prevent bugs like this?
gnufx commented on How Britain got its first internet connection (2015) theconversation.com/how-b... · Posted by u/samizdis
Not relevant to the article, but for the history of UK academic networking mentioned in various comments, Wikipedia's account looks about right, though I'm not sure it's up-to-date concerning the regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET
I was using SRCnet in 1981, when Liverpool Physics had a dedicated link to Daresbury (national lab) whose speed I don't remember at that stage. Unfortunately the infamous PDP11 "terminal concentrators" for interactive use then were horribly unreliable. RJE to the cloud, where analyses ran, worked well.
gnufx commented on How Britain got its first internet connection (2015) theconversation.com/how-b... · Posted by u/samizdis
JANET went live in 1984. Before then, UK universities were connected by X.25 links with ARPAnet gateways to Rest of World. (Such as it was then - basically the US and Scandinavia.)
You could, with a tiny amount of password hacking, joyride around the system quite easily, at least as far as getting to a login message on a remote host, possibly logging on with a guest account and having a text chat with surprised people in other countries.
Yes, SRCNET/SERCNET/JANET were great as a physics researcher, despite what people have said about X.25. A potentially interesting point is that TCP/IP on JANET originally ran over X.25 until X.25 was finally phased out.