Re: OT: Programming Languages

Hello!

On 9/9/05, Ph.D. <phil@...> wrote:
> Julia "Schnecki" Simon" wrote:
> >
> > But if Lisp is an extremely good language for string handling
> > for some reason, that would also be good news for me, since
> > I'm learning Lisp anyway (I'm using Emacs a lot and I've found
> > that it's much more fun if you know how to configure the thing;
> > and for that you need to know Lisp). :-)
>
> Does anyone still use SNOBOL ?
Hmm... I remember SNOBOL, even though I've never actually used it. I
heard many good things about it in the late 1980s/early 1990s, but
unfortunately I never had the time to take a closer look at all the
wonderful applications people told me they'd written in SNOBOL.

(When I was mature enough to write my own linguistic applications, it
had apparently gone out of fashion already. Has anybody here ever
heard of COMSKEE? Probably not... anyway, that's what I used for my
first serious steps into linguistic programming.)

> And back when I programmed
> on Unix, I preferred vi to emacs (which everyone else in my office
> used).
Until some years ago, vi was "the (only) Unix editor" for me, probably
because it had been the default editor on the Unix machines at our
university. Emacs was "that weird thing some other people use". I had
some coworkers for whom it was exactly the other way around, though.
(I was working in Unix/Linux-only or mostly-Unix/Linux environments
back then.)

Then I started working for an otherwise nice company where we have to
use Windows for various political reasons I won't go into. ;-(
Fortunately, I managed to find one halfway decent editor on my
computer -- Emacs (and boy, was I glad that I didn't have to resort to
Notepad for text editing). So I started playing around with Emacs, and
one thing led to another, and now I'm very happy with "the best of
both worlds" -- Emacs with viper mode (a vi emulator) running at
level 5 (the highest level, with all the
are-you-sure-you-meant-to-press-this-key safeguards off).

I still use vi for most editing tasks on my Linux box at home, but for
certain things I now prefer Emacs (which has some nifty add-ons for
specialized tasks and can be used to render HTML, read mail and
newsgroups, and play text adventures) even there.

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)

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