Howdy!

I started posting this as a reply on the poll, but it got out of hand... :)

I picked other.

While I am somewhat competent in several of the languages listed, none of them really call out as "favorite".

What I wanted to vote for (and did not for a moment expect to see as an option) was TUTOR, the language of PLATO (of blessed memory).

PLATO was a multiuser computer based education system that ran on CDC mainframes. The terminals were specialized (not surprising for the '70s, featuring 512x512 resolution with square pixels. TUTOR had a lot of graphics commands. During my time on PLATO, I saw the language evolve considerably.

A TUTOR program (or lesson, as it was called) consisted of a bunch of "unit"s. Control flowed from one unit to another, with a number of named function keys available to the user. One could also call a unit as a subroutine (although that was not an original feature).

TUTOR evolved in a manner that would be familiar to long- time Perl users.

PLATO introduced me to a number of things that have been hard to replace even today. email and newsgroups were both early features. Multiuser programs (frequently games) were numerous in type and nature.

Have you ever played Shanghai? It was first written on PLATO. Robert Woodhead of Wizardry fame got his start on PLATO -- in fact, when it first came out for the Mac, there was a support group on PLATO.

empire was a highly refined, Star Trek inspired, space combat and conquest game. It could handle up to 30 players on four teams. It was so heavily used that it actually uncovered bugs in the multiprocessor version of PLATO by actually executing on both CPUs simultaneously.

DnD games were all over the place. Some featured multiplayer action.

User interface issues were very important. I've taken a lot of my biases from my experience there. System security was also very important. The concept of a Secure Attention Key -- an untrappable keystroke -- was prominent. You could trap any keystroke but Shift-STOP.

I remember when "local variables" became available. I remember when the "loop..endloop" commands became available. I remember when explicit arrays became available. I remember having to carefully plan out how to use the 150 60-bit words with care.

Those were the days...

yours,
Michael

In reply to My (other) favorite language by herveus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.