Re: Bare-Metal Programming

On Jan 15, 7:08 pm, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Scottman" <FonzoC...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
So in regard to the first assembler ever written- was it machine coded
on one of these punch cards and loading into memory where it could be
run?  Once this was accomplished were punch cards slowly replaced by
assembly code?

The first assembler was met with outrage.

"You'd use a computer for a CLERICAL task?"

Von Neumann on record as opposed to the very idea. In fact, it was
marginalized as a feminine concern. Admiral Grace Hopper motivated to
give mere "girls" a break. I debugged a Fortran compiler in machine
language to give myself a break, and guiltily did so off-hours and
with permission to use the mainframe. I then used Fortran in
preference to assembler whenever I could, since I'd "proved" to myself
that I could program not only in assembler but in machine language.

Which may go far to explain the low self-esteem we see here motivating
personal attacks. Programmers feel themselves feminized and marginal.

The development of languages a dialectic: between a human desire to
make life easier and to think more freely meets a shame that we cannot
code in machine language like Real Men.

Thus, C at one and the same time a snook cocked at a computing
establishment (Multics, PL.I and Fortran) which in FAILING to
establish its own paternity in Algol, winds up today as a new
orthodoxy with its own shibboleths and rites.

C becoming a sort of techno-romance which both inspired and was
inspired by the Star Wars mythos: that we, the pure and good young C
programmers, armed with a new paradigm which allows us the best of
many worlds (such as the ability to program at the bare metal, BUT in
a syntax redolent of Algol, the slain father), can make a new world
free of the formality and corruption of the old.

We always oppose (the chant of the tribe goes) the fussy and safety
oriented "academic" (R2D2) with the more exciting and sexy pragmatic
(C3PO and Han Solo) while allowing the academic a sort of
constitutional monarch's role as we just barely tolerated Wirth.

Today, we vote Republican. Well, perhaps for Mrs. Clinton.

But we'll never grow up. We're uh Republican Buddhists.

Or something.

So it goes, the tribal chant...


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