I had read a typical Indian CS book that was full of terminology and no useful info, so I was aware compilers and interpreters existed as words, nothing more. But I thought, maybe I can write a program that "runs a program"? I knew nothing, so I created the world's worst programming language: ↵ - ThreadSky

shriram.bsky.social • 131 days ago

I had read a typical Indian CS book that was full of terminology and no useful info, so I was aware compilers and interpreters existed as words, nothing more. But I thought, maybe I can write a program that "runs a program"? I knew nothing, so I created the world's worst programming language: ↵

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angadh.com•131 days ago

Let us C 😂

shriram.bsky.social•131 days ago

Haha! But that was after my time. That at least had code. My first text was just pictures and words. You'd get quizzed, very earnestly, on the difference between a mainframe, a microcomputer, a this, a that… I still don't know what they are. (-:

angadh.com•131 days ago

Indian universities in the 2000s: 'Write perfect code without ever touching a computer'
Google interviews in 2024: 'Write perfect code on a whiteboard'

Indian unis were just 20 years ahead in making students suffer efficiently 😅

shriram.bsky.social•131 days ago

Indeed, as far as I'm concerned pretty much all of Indian education is predicated on you-know-which Nietzschean principle — this is just one sample from a large space. (-:

shriram.bsky.social•131 days ago

It was in BASIC, and I had no dynamic data structures, and I didn't know parsing, you could have only 26 variables, and all had to be 1-letter long so I could do array lookups. Just utter crap like that. I barely got it working because…BASIC on a cassette tape. ↵

shriram.bsky.social•131 days ago

I wrote most of the code on paper (because I didn't have a computer), then a while later actually got a computer and typed it in painstakingly. It barely ran. Programs were of course one big string. All the usual stuff you would expect from the worst programming language. ↵

shriram.bsky.social•131 days ago

But it meant that when I got to college and saw SICP, I knew what the game already was. And when I got to compilers and read about parsing, I was like, "Oh, THAT'S what I was missing!" (But by then I knew about s-expressions, so that is also the last time I touched parsing.) ↵

shriram.bsky.social•131 days ago

Doing dumb shit on my own was the best education I had. No teachers, no books, nothing, just trying to find patterns in programming, in data, in natural language. I knew there was no way people memorized n-thousand words for SAT, so set about finding patterns, and thus realized Latin roots, etc. ↵

shriram.bsky.social•131 days ago

Kids need to have the time to do this sort of thing. Just poke around at random and build crappy mental models. If you are then *also* open to formal education, you realize you have a rich set of samples to draw on and fit into actual theories. Premature over-formalization leads to rigor…mortis.

guha-anderson.com•131 days ago

I did manage to hand-roll a bad parser, which was a small leap from regular expressions, which were in C# by that time. However, I failed to figure out how to represent sum types (i.e., for values). My final note from 25 years ago says:

shriram.bsky.social•131 days ago

Wait, did you rediscover the Visitor Pattern for yourself? What is `EvaluateMe`?

geomblog.bsky.social•131 days ago

I think that's what LLMs are providing now for kids wanting to tinker. just playing with the chatbots and finding ways to mess with them.

shriram.bsky.social•131 days ago

That's certainly a feature.

I offered to pay for prizes for a "let's jailbreak the LLM we're using in class" contest in my kid's history class. The teacher loved it, but pointed out that he has even more valuable things than my gift cards to offer the kids (like homework passes). (-:

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