Dr. Dobb's | Interview With Ward Cunningham | May 15, 2012

[Owen Densmore]

For fans of computing history, Ward Cunningham is a very interesting dude and the creator of wikis.

DDJ has an interview:

http://www.drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=240000393&siteSectionName=architecture-and-design

I was surprised by his use of CoffeeScript, a compile-to-javascript language we've been looking at.  

Near the end you'll find this .. coffeescript, ruby, perl, smalltalk, node.js and more!

   -- Owen

<snip>

Current Programming Environment

DDJ: Tell me a little about your programming environment. What tools do you use for your day-to-day work and what languages are you programming in?

Cunningham: You know, I try not to get bound too much to anything in particular.

DDJ: I presume you must be using JavaScript if you're doing wikis and using JSON.

Cunningham: I'll tell you right now what I'm using and I'm enjoying is I write CoffeeScript, and TextMate, although I'm trying to learn Sublime Text 2, which I guess is the hot new editor. So, I switch back and forth between both of those. And it's been really nice. And of course, I love it because with one keystroke I can see the results of what I've written. I can select a paragraph and say, "run just this part." So it has this feel, that it's not very far from the engine. Of course, what engine is that? Well, there's node.js running right behind that, so I'm pounding things into node.js without hardly thinking about it.

I looked at it and I said, 'Who would have thought of making a language like that?' That's when I realized that open source was here to stay. There is no commercial endeavor that ever would have invented Perl.

In CoffeeScript, it feels very nice for me for doing the kind of things I'm doing now, which is programming event-driven stuff that's deeply nested, and it does that well. I will admit that I was a Smalltalk zealot, and I believed that Smalltalk could be the only language, and I knew about a dozen reasons why, and one of them was that once everybody programmed in Smalltalk, we would all communicate with objects. But that didn't happen. And the day that I gave up on that vision, I said, "You know what, we're all going to communicate with text files. We're all going to go ripping through these text files plundering them for whatever information we can infer from it."

That's when I picked up Perl. And it shocked me, just how well it worked for finding and plundering files because it had those reg exes built in and stuff like that. And it was so fast. It was fast to compile, it was fast to develop, it was fast to run. I could not believe it was so fast. And I know people like to complain about it, but I also thought it showed a tremendous amount of insight. It was insight, and I looked at it and I said, "Who would have thought of making a language like that?" That's when I realized that open source was here to stay. There is no commercial endeavor that ever would have invented Perl.

But Perl was my escape from object-oriented programming, and I still use it today. Probably a day doesn't go by that I don't just pick up Perl right at the command line just because idiomatically I can write commands. I know there's a command in UNIX but rather than go the command page and try to remember the options, I just write it from scratch in Perl. You know, I go on and finish the line. I know Perl well enough that I can do that. I think if you write big programs you know stuff that I never bothered to learn about Perl.

And of course Ruby has Perl as its father and Smalltalk as its mother, and so Ruby feels pretty good to me too. So those are the ones I like the most. And I've got a Macbook Air here, which is a pretty nice computer, especially if you commute by bicycle, it's not very heavy. I haven't bothered to update to Lion yet.

</snip>

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