Programmer Humor

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Why do people faint at the sight of plain-text code? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago by mugdad1@lemm.ee to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25277566

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[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 40 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog...)