:languages of choice: n. {C} and {LISP}. Nearly every
hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both.
Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential
communities.
There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with
FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They
often prefer to be known as {Real Programmer}s, and other
hackers consider them a bit odd (see "{The Story of Mel, a
Real Programmer}" in {Appendix A}). Assembler is generally no longer
considered interesting or appropriate for anything but {HLL}
implementation, {glue}, and a few time-critical and
hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a
shrinking niche in scientific programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages like {{Pascal}} and
{{Ada}}, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered
necessary for hacking (see {bondage-and-discipline language}),
and to regard everything even remotely connected with {COBOL} or
other traditional {card walloper} languages as a total and
unmitigated {loss}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
bondage-and-discipline language: A language (such as {{Pascal}}
{{Ada}}, APL, or Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose,
is designed so as to enforce an author's theory of `right
programming' even though said theory is demonstrably inadequate for
systems hacking or even vanilla general-purpose programming....
Pascal n.
An Algol-descended language designed by
Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional
tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily
to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus
extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of
view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact,
became the ancestor of a large family of languages including
Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline l
summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly
funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&...
bondage-and-discipline language n.
A language (such as
Pascal Ada, APL, or Prolog) that, though ostensibly
general-purpose, is designed so as to enforce an author's theory of
`right programming' even though said theory is demonstrably
inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla general-purpose
programming....
