Python is slow and significant whitespace is patently absurd.

Bloody rubbish, it's all bloody rubbish.

Message ends.

/Flibble

--
😎

On 06/05/2021 14.11, Mr Flibble wrote:
> Python is slow

Maybe it's for your OS is slow by nature

On 5/6/21 6:11 AM, Mr Flibble wrote:
> Python is slow and significant whitespace is patently absurd.
>
> Bloody rubbish, it's all bloody rubbish.
>
> Message ends.
>
> /Flibble
>
Machine language is so much simpler, and you can code with just a hexpad.

>
> Machine language is so much simpler, and you can code with just a hexpad.
>

Pshaa... All you need are front panel switches. ;-) (Yes, I had a professor
who required is to 'key' in our programs on the front panel, of a rack
mounted PDP-11 as I recall. Needless to say, we didn't use an assembler
either. We just wrote raw opcodes and their arguments on paper. This was in
the late 70s.)

Skip

>

Am 06.05.21 um 19:54 schrieb Skip Montanaro:
>>
>> Machine language is so much simpler, and you can code with just a hexpad.
>>
>
> Pshaa... All you need are front panel switches. ;-) (Yes, I had a professor
> who required is to 'key' in our programs on the front panel, of a rack
> mounted PDP-11 as I recall. Needless to say, we didn't use an assembler
> either. We just wrote raw opcodes and their arguments on paper. This was in
> the late 70s.)

Pure luxury! https://xkcd.com/378/

Christian

Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> writes:

>>
>> Machine language is so much simpler, and you can code with just a hexpad.
>>
>
> Pshaa... All you need are front panel switches. ;-) (Yes, I had a professor
> who required is to 'key' in our programs on the front panel, of a rack
> mounted PDP-11 as I recall. Needless to say, we didn't use an assembler
> either. We just wrote raw opcodes and their arguments on paper. This was in
> the late 70s.)

That's right about whn I had to do that for one assignment (on a Nova).
Hand-assembling, toggling in, and debugging a program on the front panel
was a valuable learning exercise. Doing it a second time wouldn't have
been helpful...

One nice thing was the computer had core memory, and the students made
an agreement as to who got which part. You could work for a while, shut
the machine down, come back the next day, power it up, and your program
would still be there.

Actually, Joe, putting in any serious program using toggle switches without
anything like a BACKSPACE was very hard as I often had to abort and start
again. Doing it twice the same way, Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!

Luckily, I only had to do it a few times to learn just like I had to write
assembler programs or feed in programs from paper tape or from punch cards.
Most of us have moved on stage by stage and now tools like Python or
libraries and modules often at higher levels are more the norm.

Can you imagine taking any modern program in digital form as zeroes and ones
and entering it by hand? Some are huge and especially if anything like
shared libraries also has to be keyed in.

But reminiscing is getting away from the point of expressing our sarcasm
about one of the people that makes us want to segregate this forum as one
way to not get into silly discussions like this!

-----Original Message-----
From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+avigross=verizon.net@python.org> On
Behalf Of Joe Pfeiffer
Sent: Thursday, May 6, 2021 3:03 PM
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: Re: Bloody rubbish

Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> writes:

>>
>> Machine language is so much simpler, and you can code with just a hexpad.
>>
>
> Pshaa... All you need are front panel switches. ;-) (Yes, I had a
> professor who required is to 'key' in our programs on the front panel,
> of a rack mounted PDP-11 as I recall. Needless to say, we didn't use
> an assembler either. We just wrote raw opcodes and their arguments on
> paper. This was in the late 70s.)

That's right about whn I had to do that for one assignment (on a Nova).
Hand-assembling, toggling in, and debugging a program on the front panel was
a valuable learning exercise. Doing it a second time wouldn't have been
helpful...

One nice thing was the computer had core memory, and the students made an
agreement as to who got which part. You could work for a while, shut the
machine down, come back the next day, power it up, and your program would
still be there.
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

On 06/05/2021 11.53, Wayne Lodahl wrote:
> On 5/6/21 6:11 AM, Mr Flibble wrote:
>> Python is slow and significant whitespace is patently absurd.
>>
>> Bloody rubbish, it's all bloody rubbish.
>>
>> Message ends.
>>
>> /Flibble
>>
> Machine language is so much simpler, and you can code with just a hexpad.

That's what the sixteen toggle switches are for.

--
Michael F. Stemper
Life's too important to take seriously.

On Thursday 06 May 2021 13:54:23 Skip Montanaro wrote:

> > Machine language is so much simpler, and you can code with just a
> > hexpad.
>
> Pshaa... All you need are front panel switches. ;-) (Yes, I had a
> professor who required is to 'key' in our programs on the front panel,
> of a rack mounted PDP-11 as I recall. Needless to say, we didn't use
> an assembler either. We just wrote raw opcodes and their arguments on
> paper. This was in the late 70s.)
>
> Skip

That brings back memories. I was the ACE at KRCR in Redding CA, and I saw
a huge quality destroying bottleneck in producing our own commercials
and proposed to the GM that I wanted to learn something about computers,
and I thought it would be a way around it, by having it installi the cue
tones that made an autmatic station break sequencer work, as opposed to
copying a blank tape from a poor master, then dub copying the finished
commercial to the bad copy.

Sounded like a good idea, so I ordered a quest super elf board which only
had a hex keypad and hex monitor, along with a copy of RCA's programming
the 1802. This was in 1978 IIRC. That grew an s-100 backplane and a
$400 4k of static ram kit. And I built the rest of the interfaceing
including the video to lay a new, digital academy leader countdown out
of whole cloth.

Then I eventually went down the road in search of taller grass. I left
instructions as to how to patch it for for the ballistics of newer tape
machines and forgot about it, eventually landing for good in WV as the
CE at a CBS affiliate in '84. In '94, I took my then fairly new wife
who has now passed on from COPD, to meet an aunt of mine, in her 80's as
I figured I was running out of time to do that, so we booked a flight to
Portland and she would meet us there and take us to her place in Salem.
While there, I called that tv station and found out they were still
using my gismo. 16+ years in a tv stations control room is unheard of
but they said it was working fine and was one heck of a labor saver.
With memory of only 4k, I used a lot of self-modifying code, but was
very carefull to re-init it at the top of the loop. It didn't crash,
ever. I shanghied an old cart deck that was off speed for power failure
recovery storage since the thing had only a 256 byte boot eprom. When I
left I took a cart with 3 copy's on it, and a paper copy of the hex
codes and assembly nemonics if it ever grew an assembler, which it
didn't. I can reach it by standing up to reach the shelf it is on above
me.

And if I had to fix it today, I could "get my head" back into "my head"
easier than I can make python work when it doesn't. I'm lurking here,
trying to learn about python, but TBT, most of you are talking above my
pay grade. Way too afraid you are doing some students homework rather
than dropping into teacher mode, a fault of this list.

Take care and stay well, all of you.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

@Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> That ran deep. I was going
to ask you were doing in PythonLand but you
answered it at the end. Maybe i should ask what
made you interested in Python in the first place?

On 2021-05-06 21:35, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Thursday 06 May 2021 13:54:23 Skip Montanaro wrote:
>
>> > Machine language is so much simpler, and you can code with just a
>> > hexpad.
>>
>> Pshaa... All you need are front panel switches. ;-) (Yes, I had a
>> professor who required is to 'key' in our programs on the front panel,
>> of a rack mounted PDP-11 as I recall. Needless to say, we didn't use
>> an assembler either. We just wrote raw opcodes and their arguments on
>> paper. This was in the late 70s.)
>>
[snip]
> Sounded like a good idea, so I ordered a quest super elf board which only
> had a hex keypad and hex monitor, along with a copy of RCA's programming
> the 1802. This was in 1978 IIRC. That grew an s-100 backplane and a
> $400 4k of static ram kit. And I built the rest of the interfaceing
> including the video to lay a new, digital academy leader countdown out
> of whole cloth.
>
4K? Luxury!

My first machine was a Mk14 from Science of Cambridge. I had the extra
RAM and the I/O chip, giving a total of 768 bytes (256 + 256 + 128,
non-contiguous, of course). And one of the bits in the second block was
faulty.