"Why would you want more than machine language?"

John von Neumann, when he first heard about FORTRAN in 1954, was unimpressed and asked "why would you want more than machine language?" One of von Neumann's students at Princeton recalled that graduate students were being used to hand assemble programs into binary for their early machine. This student took time out to build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about it he was very angry, saying that it was a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work.

cool story, bro

>>2
Thanks for posting on my thread, man!
I was getting worried I would receive no replies.
But I remained optimistic till the end! Such a good little story, such a captivating title, there was no way it would go unnoticed!
I really appreciate your response, hopefully the first of many.
Let's get this going, fellas! This is going to be a great thread!

>>3
I enjoyed reading it.

Best thread on /prog/, hands down.

That's cause von Neumann was an inhumane Jew who loved torturing goys.

This thread makes baby Dijkstra cry.

>>1
I enjoyed reading your post. I hope to see more high-quality posts in the future.

I love this thread. I just had to reply to it

Tell von Neumann about JavaScript

Tell me about these fucking dubs

FORTRAN spawned a generation of retards like McCarthy and Sussman who think programming is about languages.

>>11
Why would you want more than one 1?

>>12
Automata and grammars are at the core of computer science. No one's fault but yur own that you can't separate the mathematics of processes from rounding corners and webapps^2.0, you mental midget.

>>14
Nobody said anything about ``Automata and grammmars''

CS classes are more about Java and Scheme (or C, Haskell, JavaScript, Python, or some other ``programming language'') than they are about programming.

Some PL theorists say that programming languages (which they call ``lambda calculus'') are more important than automata (which they call ``Turing machines'').

I don't see why you'd need anything more than wiring some vacuum tubes together.

>>15
While CS itself is not about any particular programming language, it is also not about programming.