glum64

Those situations, albeit rare, are /highly instructive/; they shove the programmer's nose right into a misplaced artistry.

There is no right or wrong, only what works and what does not.

Obviously the author never fixed 10 y.o. bugs at 0430 hrs in a room full of people watching his every finger. In moments like that, the programmer wants to work with the most boring, straightforward code.

Artistry contests is sometging else. I like doing this (iteration [0..9] backwards):

size_t i = 9;

for ( ; i < 10; i -- ) ...

It is easy. We heard many angry programmers going ballistic about (un)maintainability of slop. That's the same, but very much more complex: imagine a large proof that maybe looks correct but it was written by a mentally unstable person that just committed suicide. What is its value?

The first language is formative. It gets the programmer to think at a particular level of abstraction. If that level is wrong for the problem at hand, the programmer needs another language.

Write, say, a boot loader, for enlightement.

I am trilingual. All of my languages belong to different language groups; I regularly read and write in both directions. I use all of the three languages every day. I can also bulldoze my way through a text in a fourth language given a dictionary and a reference for its grammar. I can read the alphabet of a fifth language (mostly w/o understanding the sounds that I make, but I am told that I get it right).

I got there 15 years ago. I seem to be unable to learn anything new since.

label: goto label;

Did anyone else recall Libbie's Song by Patty Smith? How sad.

It depends on the implementation. CLISP compiles when it is told to.

Uhm, Common Lisp, where JIT is not only available but is also manageable: the programmer can decide what deserves to be compiled and what does not.

Besides run time, JIT is available also when the code is compiled or loaded for execution (i.e., do you have a compilation or loading speed-up in mind? no problem, you can also compile that speed-up into native machine code, and so ad infinitum...).

Stopped reading at "The MX record says where the mailbox lives."