Saturday, December 29, 2007
Cows, part 1
I first learned to hack code in BASIC and Pascal, but the language that truly brought me into the inner circle of real programmers was the MOO language. Invented at the famous Xerox PARC facility, MOOs were programmable, object-oriented, networkable, multi-user, concurrent, distributed environments. Every nerd's wet dream.
An icon of MOO days was yduJ ("rhymes with fudge"), who wrote a few tutorials on the inner workings of MOOs. I am convinced that if a CS grad cannot explain all the concepts touched on in the MOO Lore Pamphlet, they should get a hard spanking and a stern talking-to. Although I didn't realize it at the time, the pamphlet mentions:
Sadly, the MOO where I truly learned to code is now basically a museum relic - it's once-youthful population has reached old age (i.e., kicked out of our parents' basements) and has moved on. Mostly to Google, it seems.
An icon of MOO days was yduJ ("rhymes with fudge"), who wrote a few tutorials on the inner workings of MOOs. I am convinced that if a CS grad cannot explain all the concepts touched on in the MOO Lore Pamphlet, they should get a hard spanking and a stern talking-to. Although I didn't realize it at the time, the pamphlet mentions:
- network latency
- usenet
- virtual memory and paging
- concurrency
- timeslicing
- caching (and arguably, memoization)
- event-based programming
- heritability of security permissions
- setuid
- spoofing attacks
- stack walking
Sadly, the MOO where I truly learned to code is now basically a museum relic - it's once-youthful population has reached old age (i.e., kicked out of our parents' basements) and has moved on. Mostly to Google, it seems.
