Books for the NOC guys...

Fri Apr 2 21:08:35 UTC 2010

On Friday 02 April 2010 04:08:03 pm Michael Dillon wrote:
> If someone wanted to play the game and trump me, then they would
> quote the title of another book, or at least a substantial website
> tutorial, that uses another programming language.

I wish I could reply to this yesterday....  Then, I would have simply pointed 
to http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/intercal.ps.gz and let that hang out 
there for a while.  One of the finest examples of a write-only language.

Or, better yet, I could point you to a non-April 1st CGI programming example: 
http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/bickel/archive/colorit-fortran-get-cgi-example.txt

Please at least look at that last link even if you already know better than to 
read the PostScript document at the first link. Look at where the CGI example 
came from, and consider doing something like rancid in either of those two 
languages.  There is worse out there than perl.  Also consider that the second 
link was originally written for VAX/VMS.

I've personally used expect (and the tcl underpinnings) for a number of years, 
but I wouldn't call it very readable.  If you want to force people to write 
things that are readable, choose COBOL.  See 
http://theamericanprogrammer.com/books/books.cobol.shtml for a list of 
pertinent books.

Having said all that, I'll agree with Michael on using Python, as it is very 
readable even when you try to obfuscate it, thanks in no small part to the 
whole 'indentation is significant' design decision.