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Enrico:

I miss using RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) on my HP29C, (please see photo) with 32 memories (16 of them continuous, 16 volatile), 100 programming steps ...

All this in the past millennium ...

If you think you are a dinosaur for this, what would I be, starting to program on the Intel 8008 in 1973?

 

Em 2020-02-04 07:58, Enrico Colombini escreveu:

On 04-Feb-20 00:46, Sean Conner wrote:
   I then remembered programming in BASIC as a kid, where I would have to
deal with code that looked like:

    0 'CODE TAKEN FROM THE RAINBOW M
    AGAZINE, VOL. IV, NO. 1 (AUGUST
    1984), PAGE 78-'SOPWITH COCO' FL
    IES AGAIN!
    1700 X=30+SIN(JB)*28:Y=160-COS(J
    B)*28:CIRCLE(FA,FB),1,0:CIRCLE(X
    ,Y),1,1:FA=X:FB=Y:RETURN
 [snip]

(the limits of 32K RAM and a 32 column screen).  I even went on (again, as
a kid) to learn assembly langauge (for multiple machines even!).

Fond memories :-)
(I actually started with RPN on HP calculators, then pencil-assembling and hand-typing hex code on a KIM-1, then learned BASIC. Yes, I'm a dinosaur)
   What does this mean for Lua?  I don't know.  The trends I do see is that
the more opinionated a tool set is (Go---there's only one way to format the
code; Python---there's only one way to to things) the more popular (because
programmers don't have to think.  The more batteries are available, the less
code that has to be written, the less a programmer has to think, the better.
The more popular a language is, the less chance of being fired over using
it, the better (no one ever got fired for buying IBM, or Microsoft).

I think you are right. It could be down to limited time, limited attention span, desire/need to see results immediately, lower concentration required, plain laziness...
Not the world I'd prefer if I had a choice, but it is the one we live in.

Basically, the larger the user space you wish for, the dumbest (in a broad sense) the language and its environment have to be, at least on the surface.

   So alternatively, a language has to be useful, but not require thinking
and very popular.  Kind of explains _javascript_ in a way ...

Well, _javascript_ lives in a different environment where it could do worse, especially in the latest version. On the other hand, most Web programmers write trivial code but use opaque libraries / frameworks they have no control over.

   -spc (Thining of bowing out of the whole batteries thang for Lua---it's
    just not worth the effort because of laziness on the part of
    everybody else ... )

Uh... your honor, I plead guilty here.
That's one of the reasons I think a small-steps policy would be easier to pursue.

 

--
Fernando Jefferson
CCE-PUC-Rio - Professor
Projeto UpLua - Coordenador
Cel: +5521-99763-2135