- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25277566
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…)
That’s a very Earth-centric assumption
You should have tried programming a 68000 about 40 years ago. I dreamed in binary for the duration of that class.
some languages are however made to be anti-human, looking at you brainfuck and whitespace
Well so is torture
Adding to what others in thread have said, there are languages that are more usable and are more user-centric. I’ll say something that’s a bit gross but makes the point clear: if you’re brave enough, anything can be a sex toy. Ergonomics matter.
You forgot to attribute your quote. Abraham Lincoln originally said that!
They’re not humans, they’re programmers.
To be fair, they share 98% of their DNA with humans.
So do bananas
You mean they’ve adapted? Learned to copy our DNA?
bytecode and IL enter the chat
To be a pedantic dick, those aren’t really programming languages. Their purpose isn’t for writing at that level.
Machine codes are not programming language.
oh shit
Inline some assembly and delete this
? VB