What's The Greatest Software Ever Written?

[laptop]

a completely normal language.

For some values of "normal"

 

[Kameron]

For some values of "normal"

A "you'll kick yourself" value my friend.

 

[fogbat]

Looks like a function definition in a language like C++, only without any name. And I've no idea what the colons at the start + finish mean.

*looks very noobish*

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

Pro Tools.

 

[rich!]

I prefer

:(){ :|:& };:

Bash runs it.

:() ... ;

defines a function :
The function body { ... } runs a pipeline of two :'s, one in the background.

The ; at the end is a statement separator.

The last : executes it.

It's a bash fork bomb. (says he, following a reboot )

 

[electroplated]

Pro Tools.

How about Cubase for the Atari ST?

 

[Structaural]

Photoshop and all that world webby thing (opera?)

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Talking about programming languages, I've been very interested in what I've heard about Arc so far. It sounds very appealing in a 'best aspects of Lisp and Perl' sort of way.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I was just poking about on Graham's site and came across this nice essay about what makes a good programming language.

Classic macros are a real hacker's tool-- simple, powerful, and dangerous. It's so easy to understand what they do: you call a function on the macro's arguments, and whatever it returns gets inserted in place of the macro call. Hygienic macros embody the opposite principle. They try to protect you from understanding what they're doing. I have never heard hygienic macros explained in one sentence. And they are a classic example of the dangers of deciding what programmers are allowed to want. Hygienic macros are intended to protect me from variable capture, among other things, but variable capture is exactly what I want in some macros.

A really good language should be both clean and dirty: cleanly designed, with a small core of well understood and highly orthogonal operators, but dirty in the sense that it lets hackers have their way with it. C is like this. So were the early Lisps. A real hacker's language will always have a slightly raffish character.

A good programming language should have features that make the kind of people who use the phrase "software engineering" shake their heads disapprovingly.

source

 

[Dubversion]

Quake

 

[rich!]

Over the years I'v learnt a few programming languages - BASIC, FORTH, LOGO, LISP, FORTRAN, various assemblers, M4, C, C++, Python, BASH, Perl, Modula-2, Modula-3, and a few others I've forgotten.

Graham's comment is a fairly good one, but there is one other point that needs making: the difficulty of reading the code when you come back to it later.

Macro stuff can be an absolute nightmare for that. But, by the ghods, is it powerful when you need it...

 

[Kameron]

It's a bash fork bomb. (says he, following a reboot )

I owe you a beer - see you round soon

 

[gnoriac]

the windows nt kernel was designed by the same guys that worked on vms. there's quite a few similarities between the two.

Cutler also co-designed RSX and wrote *all* the code of the original version himself.

 

[snadge]

Pro Tools.

is garbage, propiertry hardware needed for it to shine, even then it can be a hinderance, has been overtaken by both cubase and logic, only used by idiots with too much money nowadays.

AS for the OP, deluxe paint on the amiga alongside workbench for the amiga.

How about Cubase for the Atari ST?

which started it all...groundbreaking program, the only software that made me want an atari being an amiga owner.