Comments on: If Hemingway (and Shakespeare, and co) were coders

By: Sebastian Liem

Sebastian Liem — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 23:28:00 +0000

Sadly those works seems to be lost to the ravages of time. I did found the unix program yes for a earlier contest.

http://www.stacken.kth.se/stackhack/20050303/yes.spl

By: Jorpho

Jorpho — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:02:00 +0000

And there it is – the first time I’ve been directed to an .xxx site, and of course it has nothing whatsoever to do with pornography.

By: Chentzilla

Chentzilla — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:28:00 +0000

A good one, this.

Have you got any code left?

By: Sebastian Liem

Sebastian Liem — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 09:37:00 +0000

This reminds me of the Shakespeare programming language [1]. I remember it fondly, we had a drunken programming contest to compute the first five primes. Many great works of literature was composed.

[1]: http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/shakespeare.html

By: Beanolini

Beanolini — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 09:29:00 +0000

ACT I: in which a ZERO is added for INITIATION

I’m pretty sure that is actually valid COBOL.

By: kmoser

kmoser — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 07:30:00 +0000

I did read the article. Apparently I’m not well versed enough in the subtleties of the authors mentioned to find the code samples amusing. If you strip away the comments, they’re basically ordinary code, liberally sprinkled with comments and the occasional string that is related to the “author”.

By: toyg

toyg — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 07:20:00 +0000

I am now craving for Javascript snippets by F.S.Fitzgerald. It would give you the wrong results, but with such beauty and grace that you wouldn’t really care.

By: JohnnyMiskatonic

JohnnyMiskatonic — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 06:21:00 +0000

If you read the linked article you will find, perhaps to your great amusement, that there -are- examples of code (not comments) written in the style of the artists mentioned. As the author explains, the Bard makes a lot of comments.

By: kmoser

kmoser — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 05:13:00 +0000

Yeesh. This is simply “code comments written in the style of [your favorite author of yore].” Surmising why Javascript is more appropriate for any given author is an exercise in futile speculation; it could just as easily be done in any other language, and wouldn’t be any more or less amusing.

You want something funnier? Try writing examples of code (not comments) whose whose syntax mimics that of a given author. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader.

By: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

fuzzyfuzzyfungus — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 02:27:00 +0000

Conveniently, Progress and The Shining Future have made available a system for farming out grindingly menial tasks to the underpaid underclass within the convenient framework of javascript!

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/turkit/

(It lacks all stylistic relation to Dickens; but ‘Mechanical Turk’ is arguably one of the more eloquent middle-finger-in-the-eye-of-the-idea-of-technology-as-human-empowerment systems presently available to customers who aren’t intelligence agencies.)

By: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

fuzzyfuzzyfungus — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 02:07:00 +0000

Isn’t Hemingway the one who wrote The Old Man and the C, and cemented the status of big beards and minimalist interfaces in UNIX-user culture? I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of him…

By: Zak McKracken

Zak McKracken — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 02:00:00 +0000

It shows that the author doesn’t like Dickens. I do. However, I don’t know Javascript and shan’t learn it for this purpose.
Had I written this piece in “Dickens’ Javascript”, it should have depicted Mr Fibbowick collecting the number 0 and 1, then repairing towards his chamber where he would, with much ado, have forced poor little David to add them in an uncomfortable way to make a third, taken it, left the chamber again and proclaimed the result in a fashion such as to make sure every person in hearing range knew about the ingenious discovery he, Mr. Fibbowick, had just made regarding the n+1′th number in the sequence, then waited for whether another number is required, whereupon the whole spectacle would start over.

Dickens was not an author concerned with deep psychological studies, he was a caricaturist, and he had an agenda. One, I might add, that was well worth pursuing in his time, in his country.

By: Mordicai

Mordicai — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 01:16:00 +0000

If Shakespeare wrote code, we’d still be using it today, & building new languages to support it. If Hemingway wrote code, it would be taught in school, have the virtue of brevity but be one of those highly over-rated programing languages that people go on about but no one actually uses. Except that great 10 IF sale = “baby shoes” 20 THEN ? never used piece of coding, that is admittedly pretty great.

By: reglisse

reglisse — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 01:08:00 +0000

Ouch!> Theq
> uo ti
> ngis don> ein them o
> stun for tuna
> te man> ner.