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by ur-whale 1370 days ago
I still remember when I first read the first C implementation of this, which was IIRC by Mike Burrows.

Apparently, back in the days, Mike had some sort of philosophical opposition to indenting his C code.

I was impressed he managed to write such a complex piece of code without ever indenting anything.
3 comments
ignoramous 1370 days ago
> Apparently, back in the days, Mike had some sort of philosophical opposition to indenting his C code.

That explains his aversion to Python back then: https://archive.is/OFmNT

imo, Mike Burrows' impact on the industry rivals that of the Turing awardees. Ex A from 2008: https://archive.is/ZPd4f

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chubot 1369 days ago
Hm, it seems obvious that Guido and Python have more impact on the industry (and I'm aware of Burrows' antipathy toward Python, which was well known at Google. As far as I remember it was due to debugging a syntax error caused by indentation in SWIG/Python)

JPL and Google were early Python users. Google's crawler and the home page started out in Python (trivia: the ancient asyncore stdlib module and its author played some role, as far as I remember)

Pretty much all AI and self driving cars use Python, BitTorrent was written in Python, Python is embedded in GDB, embedded in huge commercial applications like Maya for visual effects, etc. I think Ethereum had an early Python implementation

Python's design achieved Guy Steele's "growing a language" vision in his famous talk, i.e. using operator overloading to allow scientists to create their own lingua franca -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29171519 (i.e. the talk was about adding operator overloading to Java, as well "generics" and value types)

Mike Burrows is a great (even legendary) programmer and computer scientist, but if you're talking about "impact on the industry", there are levels :) I have to say I'm a big Alta Vista fan though

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lokar 1369 days ago
And a really nice person to work with
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zshrdlu 1368 days ago
> I was impressed he managed to write such a complex piece of code without ever indenting anything.

I wonder if he'd enforce a 's/^\s*//g' pre-commit hook if you worked with him...

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im3w1l 1369 days ago
It's absolutely fascinating how many people in computing have really fringe ideas and still manage to get stuff done.
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