Dave Shields, the programmer maintaining SPITBOL | Hacker News Reader

Dave Shields, the programmer maintaining SPITBOL

motherboard.vice.com

86 pointsdorsatum23 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20150914084117/http://motherboar...

I was lucky to work a little with Dave on JIKES project and I was very impressed by both his professional and human skills. I am glad to hear about his new old project and wish him very good luck with it!

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103276

For those who want to try it in a more modern context, there is this recent port of spitbol patterns for Nim: https://github.com/Henry/Nimbol

It's great to see this work receiving more attention. If anyone starts using it, I hope you'll post about it to HN.

Interesting. At last I found a reason to read about SNOBOL. Looks like it some interesting features. I particularly like the conditional jump on success or failure.

I guess journalists read HN looking for stories? I was suprised to spitbol mentioned on HN and now there is a story on Vice news?

Alas, the interviewer asked no technical, interesting questions. There is a portable assembly language called MINIMAL that is used in spitbol. This could be a topic for an entire story itself.

IIRC there have been prior submissions of Vice stories where the author has jumped into the discussion here to clarify things, so at least one of them is familiar with the site. It doesn't seem too far fetched that HN submissions may generate the occasional interest in a story if the author happens to check in occasionally (or more).

Quote from the article:

> In a 2012 blog post describing his role as the sole contributor to the SPITBOL GitHub repository—which recently got some attention on Hacker News—Shields calls himself SPITBOL's only user as well.

Is it just me, or is there no scrollbar on this article?

I do see a scrollbar, running firefox on linux.

Come on guys, I know the comment wasn't exactly on-topic but it's a harmless question and I don't think downvotes are really called for.

http://i.imgur.com/LGp4rmw.png

Chromium on Linux.

Slightly offtopic, but is 'Coding Language' now a thing?

Eh, I assume to non-technical readers, "coding" == "programming", therefore "coding language" == "programming language". It sounds funny to us, because we usually use "programming language" or just "language", but "coding language" makes sense, I guess.

It makes me assume a non-technical writer

I guess this is pretty off-topic, but I kinda always thought it was unreasonable to regard a "high-level language" as also a "programming" language. If the idea is that it's made for humans-first-computers-second, then it's not really a "programming" language so much as a language that computers happen to be able to understand.

I mean, by this definition, since computers are getting good are parsing English, isn't English a "programming" language?

The entire purpose of a programming language is that everything written in it describes an unambigiously executable process.

English isn't and never will be a programming language, no matter how much computers will be able to comprehend.

That's only one possible interpretation of computing. The field of semiotics applied to programming has interesting uses where a program needs not be unambiguous to be useful.

It's true that the underlying hardware platform will necessarily work as a deterministic sequence of steps executing a small set of primitives - but building that sequence by hand in an unambiguous language is not necessarily the only way to control the hardware; learning methods and evolutive processes, vaguely directed from high-level goals stated in an ambiguous model, is a possible alternative to the current industrial paradigm and might become common in the future.

Computers are perfect at understanding high level programming languages, but you cannot program in English. All programming languages, including machine code are designed for humans first and computers second, within the limits of what we know how to construct. So, no.

@jMyles: you are taking too limited a view of programming language. A programming language is simply one that is suited to the task of describing a program, there need not be a computer involved. In fact the Britannica even has an article entitled "Computer programming language" which implies a distinction between "programming language" and "computer programming language". I admit it's probably not a distinction that one often has a use for.

To non-technical readers, 'coding' == 'semi-skilled trade that requires little intelligence, creativity, or problem solving skills to perform', unlike 'computer programming' or 'software engineering'. That's the real reason we're seeing it used so often in the press and in the industry and government-backed 'teach everyone to code' wage-reduction schemes disguised as educational initiatives.

We changed the title since the local audience knows all about this.

Dave Winer (whatever you think of him) had some pretty insightful commentary on this increasing usage of 'coder' and 'coding' by journalists, VCs, and politicians:

http://scripting.com/2014/06/04/#a1401884889

http://scripting.com/2014/08/27/whatCoderMeansToMe.html

Quoting the first:

>I joked on Twitter that if VCs and reporters want to call us coders, maybe we should call them accountants or keypressers.

Since the 'keypressers' at Motherboard seem to rely on interviews with programmers like Dave Shields for at least some of their material, perhaps we should stop cooperating with them until they stop calling us 'coders' and describing what we do as 'coding'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com