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Programming and Scripting => Projects and Discussion => Topic started by: xzid on November 08, 2011, 08:42:22 AM

Title: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Post by: xzid on November 08, 2011, 08:42:22 AM

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html (http://www.cs.utah.edu/%7Eelb/folklore/mel.html)

This is one of the coolest programming articles I've read. I think we can all learn something from Mel.

TL;DR: we all suck, ASM is for n00bs.

Title: Re: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Post by: bubzuru on November 08, 2011, 04:29:22 PM

will read it now  :P

Title: Re: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Post by: bubzuru on November 08, 2011, 04:42:08 PM

makes you think how easy we have it

my fav quotes

Quote

Mel didn't approve of compilers.

Quote

"If a program can't rewrite its own code", he asked, "what good is it?"

Quote

The new computer had a one-plus-one
     addressing scheme,
     in which each machine instruction,
     in addition to the operation code
     and the address of the needed operand,
     had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
     the next instruction was located.

     In modern parlance,
     every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
     Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it

Quote

He had located the data he was working on near the top of memory --- the largest locations the instructions could address --- so, after the last datum was handled, incrementing the instruction address would make it overflow. The carry would add one to the operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set: a jump instruction. Sure enough, the next program instruction was in address location zero, and the program went happily on its way.

nice read +1

Title: Re: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Post by: ca0s on November 08, 2011, 05:04:58 PM

Magnífico.

Title: Re: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Post by: FuyuKitsune on November 08, 2011, 09:10:47 PM

It's a cool story, I read it when I was going through The Jargon File (http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html)

Title: Re: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Post by: daedalus on May 02, 2012, 03:18:01 AM

Quote

in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software

Scoot over, Homer! Thanks for posting.

Title: Re: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Post by: techb on May 02, 2012, 03:56:57 AM

Code: [Select]

Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.
Sorry admins lol.

Title: Re: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Post by: L0rd_M@dness on June 05, 2012, 02:49:12 AM

There are many amazing programmers all around the globe from which you'll never even hear. I know it because I know someone just like Mel.
Also ASM does NOT SUCK, it's just another edition for machine language they're very close. If you know the highs and lows of asm, with a little more practice and a little more knowledge about the hardware, you can write machine code.

Title: Re: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Post by: Live Wire on June 14, 2012, 10:11:09 AM

That was fairly cool. I love how their "ethics" was fulfilled when the computer cheated lol

Title: Re: The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Post by: Conch on June 20, 2012, 01:13:45 PM

Code: [Select]

and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
     Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
     Not FORTRAN.  Not RATFOR.  Not, even, assembly language.
     Machine Code.
     Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
     Directly.
[code]

LOL Love this.