On 2024-11-11 19:26:12, Steve Litt wrote:
> onefang said on Tue, 12 Nov 2024 09:02:25 +1000
>
>
> >A quick search is not showing up APL or TECO. I suspect most of the
> >other obscure languages in my 100 would also be hard to find on Linux.
>
> I know nothing about APL, but if you were to speak on TECO, I doubt
> you'd get one attendee. Most of us have seen TECO in action, and most
> of those vowed never to get near it.
>
> To those who don't know what TECO is, it's ugly and dangerous.

A text editor that morphed into a programming language, if I recall
correctly.

Long time ago the government of the Australian state of Victoria decided
to legalise brothels. I was working for the Victorian Law Department at
the time. Legal brothels had to be licensed, so long story short I ended
up with the job of modifying the associations licensing database to suit
this new job. That database was written in TECO, I ended up with the job
coz no one still working there knew TECO, and they knew I could learn it
quickly and be up and running before the end of the day. One and only
time I used TECO, coz I was paid to use it.

APL is very readable, if you are doing a lot of matrix type mathematics.
Otherwise it's even worse than Perl one liners, since most of it's
characters are not part of the ASCII character set. Probably in Unicode
though, they put everything in that. Certainly not on any keyboard that
wasn't designed for typing APL. Such things exist, I have used them.

I'm unlikely to give lectures in either, I was just checking if two of
the obscure languages that have been mentioned here recently, and that I
have used, are in Linux. Not after a quick search, which is all the
effort I was willing to put in.

So GoLUG gets to avoid an ancient obscure graybeard pontificating about
ancient obscure languages to an empty room. More importantly, I don't
have to relearn enough about TECO to lecture on it. B-)

I'd be willing to relearn APL, or some descendent of it, if it was
available on Devuan. I'm considering going for an official world record
for the number of programming languages used by a human. I say human,
coz apparently AIs have zoomed right past my 100, and are over 300 last I
checked. APL would have to be part of that effort, being my first
programming language. Purely sentimental value.

Hmmm, wonder how long it takes an AI to learn a programming language from
scratch? I might still beat them. B-)

--
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.