D++ -- The Ultimate Scripting Language



  • This is a "programming language" implementation in VB6. It was written by a self-taught programmer (six years of experience now (according to the website), so no amateur), who evidently doesn't know anything about programming language implementation. The code itself is pretty WTF-worthy, though I'm probably missing a lot, since I've never touched VB before. What's more WTF-worthy, though, are his comments on the web page. Some of my favorites:

    "Redesigned variable and function system. Instead of having an array for the varnames, another for the values, another for the parent etc, a Type was used. This is not only faster (resizing 3 arrays is certainly slower than only 1!), but easier for use elsewhere. Speed increase: ~20 ms"

    In the FAQ:

    "Q: What's the purpose of DPPSecurity.dll? Where's the source?
    A: Ah, this is a handy little thing. Essentially, it is the compiler itslef AND a security verifier. The IDE passes data along to it, basically header data and the source code, and the Security DLL gets to work. It verifies that the DLL it will be using is valid and that itself is truely valid. (No, I will not tell you what it specifically checks!) From there, it compiles the application, as described in the above question.
    So why am I hiding this? It wasn't always this way. In fact, I didn't even want it to be this way. However, sometimes little script kiddies like to come along, rip my code and call it their own... sometimes doing it for profit, sometimes also badmouthing my code in the process. My friend Hawk from InfiniteRay helped me out with this one and came up with the idea for this, and wrote some of the code for the DLL. So I am sorry, I cannot distribute this code to you because of this."

    How many of you are willing to bet that his "security" is as bad as some of the other security WTFs we've seen here? (It's also worth mentioning that this is inconsistent with another part of his web page, which says that D++ is open source.)

    But, anyway, I'll leave the rest of it for you to poke through.



  • Ack! Let's try again!



    This is a "programming language" implementation in VB6. It was written
    by a self-taught programmer (six years of experience now (according to
    the website), so no amateur), who evidently doesn't know anything about
    programming language implementation. The code itself is pretty
    WTF-worthy, though I'm probably missing a lot, since I've never touched
    VB before. What's more WTF-worthy, though, are his comments on the web
    page. Some of my favorites:


    "Redesigned variable and function system. Instead of having an array
    for the varnames, another for the values, another for the parent etc, a
    Type was used. This is not only faster (resizing 3 arrays is certainly
    slower than only 1!), but easier for use elsewhere. Speed increase: ~20
    ms"

    In the FAQ:


    "Q: What's the purpose of DPPSecurity.dll? Where's the source? A: Ah,
    this is a handy little thing. Essentially, it is the compiler itslef
    AND a security verifier. The IDE passes data along to it, basically
    header data and the source code, and the Security DLL gets to work. It
    verifies that the DLL it will be using is valid and that itself is
    truely valid. (No, I will not tell you what it specifically checks!)
    From there, it compiles the application, as described in the above
    question. So why am I hiding this? It wasn't always this way. In fact,
    I didn't even want it to be this way. However, sometimes little script
    kiddies like to come along, rip my code and call it their own...
    sometimes doing it for profit, sometimes also badmouthing my code in
    the process. My friend Hawk from InfiniteRay helped me out with this
    one and came up with the idea for this, and wrote some of the code for
    the DLL. So I am sorry, I cannot distribute this code to you because of
    this."


    How many of you are willing to bet that his "security" is as bad as
    some of the other security WTFs we've seen here? (It's also worth
    mentioning that this is inconsistent with another part of his web page,
    which says that D++ is open source.) But, anyway, I'll leave the rest
    of it for you to poke through.



    Saaay... We can edit posts now, can't we? Oops.



  • That's... interesting. 

    Take a look at how he handles variables, he keeps them in an array, and when you add a new variable, it reallocates the whole array again and does so over and over as you add variables.   And to look up variable values, he linearly reads through the array.  So, just about the least efficient way of managing the info :)

    I have to give the guy a break, though, this reminds me of some of my early code before I learned what a linked list was and why it was important.   Like him, I tried something ambitious (in my case, an assembler), and the result was scarily bad -- I'm glad high school is 20 years behind me... sigh.

    Anyway, at least he has some ambition. And didn't VB6 get Dictionary class recently?  Someone should tell him that. :)

    -cw



  • To be fair, in some cases, the value of a scripting language doesn't depend on how efficiently it is implemented, but how easy it is to use. But this one truly looks WTFy, given all the "security DLL" and stuff. I can hardly imagine a script kiddy ripping this one.




  • hahaha

    sorry to laugh out - just couldn't help ...
    First thing I thought was that the author did write "a better D" the D programming language but... no, not quite that *ahem*

    Funniest comment I found in the documentation:

    "As you can see, there are unlimited possibilities with conditional statements."
    found in this page


  • @ammoQ said:

    To be fair, in some cases, the value of a scripting language doesn't depend on how efficiently it is implemented, but how easy it is to use. But this one truly looks WTFy, given all the "security DLL" and stuff. I can hardly imagine a script kiddy ripping this one.


    "This language so bad, script kiddies gonna help you improve it"



  • Eh, the guy's 17 years old.  What do you expect?



  •   Exactly.  I have been programming for 7 years now and I haven't even attempted

    my own language.  I'd say unless you have implemented your own language and

    did a better job you should keep your trap shut.




  • @DrMindHacker said:

      Exactly.  I have been programming for 7 years now and I haven't even attempted

    my own language.  I'd say unless you have implemented your own language and

    did a better job you should keep your trap shut.



    You don't have to be a hen to recognize a rotten egg.



  • @DrMindHacker said:

      Exactly.  I have been programming for 7 years now and I haven't even attempted

    my own language.  I'd say unless you have implemented your own language and

    did a better job you should keep your trap shut.




    In this case, a better job would have been not to implement anything. I have about the same amount of professional experience, and I know better than to create my own programming language, even though I think it would be fun. Making Yet Another Programming Language(TM) is possibly the most pointless exercise in modern computing. That this is a job better left to people with more experience is only an aside.



  • This brings up a good question: What drives someone to create a new programming (or script) language?

    The ones that come to mind right away:
    1. No other existing available language meets some specific features that the programmer wants/needs.
    2. An existing language does provide needed functionality, but is not easy enough or quick enough.
    3. New technology has arrived that requires new language constructs (very much like #1)
    4. For fun, to see what the programmer can do.
    5. To show off programmers amazing 133t ski11z.

    All except #5 seem like good reasons to me.
    Today, there are probably very few reasonable concepts or tasks that at least no freely available programming language can provide with a little coaxing.

    <o:p> </o:p>



  • @DrMindHacker said:

      Exactly.  I have been programming for 7 years now and I haven't even attempted

    my own language.  I'd say unless you have implemented your own language and

    did a better job you should keep your trap shut.




    Lucky thing that the only people that said Doom sucked were producers who made better movies. Also quite the coincidence that Paul and Martin Luther are the only ones that think Scientology is packed with wackos.

    Or maybe his code sucks, whether any of us have made our own language or not.



  • @felix said:

    I know better than to create my own programming language, even though I think it would be fun. Making Yet Another Programming Language(TM) is possibly the most pointless exercise in modern computing. That this is a job better left to people with more experience is only an aside.

    I'm afraid I couldn't disagree more.  If you want a pointless exercise in modern computing, write yet another web page that talks to yet another database.  You might find a good business case for it and make a lot of money, but no one who knows better is going to ooo and ahh over the mad coding skillz it took to create it.

    This guy might not have a clue how to do this properly, but he's trying, and he's learning from the attempt.  In a few years, he might write a useful language and this will be what got him started.  And more than that, it's important to learn about how languages work.  About 3 weekends ago I sat down for a few hours and wrote myself a LISP interpreter.  I had no real interest in programming in LISP, but I got hooked by the simple syntax/grammar of the language, realized it would be easy to code, and did it as an exercise.   Competely 'useless', no one is going to use my language, but it turns out I actually learned a lot in the process.  It made me a better developer, so it was worthwhile.

    But, that said, there isn't much value for anyone else to use his language :)   I'm just saying that it's a positive sign that he's making the attempt and not building Yet Another Lame Webapp.



  • @LuciferSam said:

    This brings up a good question: What drives someone to
    create a new programming (or script) language?



    I suppose #5 is the same as #4 to some people, so it's ok with me. As for the others... #1 and #2 sound like not enough research. #3 sounds like not enough thinking. What kind of new technology requires new language constructs? What new language constructs? if-else-undecided? Quantum computing is still years away. Some new high-level data structure? Name one I haven't heard of. And I don't mean some obscure kind of balanced tree known only in academia (besides, those are implemented with references and dynamic memory, something Lisp had in 1958). Something entirely different? Yeah, sure...

    @LuciferSam said:
    Today, there are probably very few reasonable concepts or tasks that at least no freely available programming language can provide with a little coaxing.


    Then again, I don't understand what you mean here, so perhaps I'm knocking on open doors :)



  • I disagree with CodeWhisperer's last statement. While I see the value of making a language as a programming excercise, it takes many years of experience (with many languages) to design a good language. Making a crappy language like D++ doesn't get the kid any closer to recognizing the beauty and power of a good language.
    In the worst case, D++ will end like PHP - many people use it despite its obvious ugliness. No, I don't want another PHP.



  • @CodeWhisperer said:

    If you want a pointless exercise in modern computing, write yet another web page that talks to yet another database.  You might find a good business case for it and make a lot of money, but no one who knows better is going to ooo and ahh over the mad coding skillz it took to create it.

    True, but anyone knows it. No one is going to advertise one's "mad coding skillz" over that.

    @CodeWhisperer said:

    In a few years, he might write a useful language

    Like what?

    @CodeWhisperer said:

    And more than that, it's important to learn about how languages work.  About 3 weekends ago I sat down for a few hours and wrote myself a LISP interpreter. I had no real interest in programming in LISP, but [...] did it as an exercise.

    And here's the whole difference: you knew it was just an exercise.

    @CodeWhisperer said:

    I'm just saying that it's a positive sign that he's making the attempt and not building Yet Another Lame Webapp.


    Perhaps it is, after all. But I'm wary of people who'd rather build things no-one is likely to need, as opposed to useful software. I knew such a "programmer". You wouldn't have caught him coding a trivial, elementary, useful web app. Guess what, nobody knew about his wonderful creations but me, and I didn't care either because I could not benefit from them in any way. Later, the guy went mad. To this day I think it was more than a simple coincidence...




  • @DrMindHacker said:

      Exactly.  I have been programming for 7 years now and I haven't even attempted

    my own language.  I'd say unless you have implemented your own language and

    did a better job you should keep your trap shut.






    I'm very interested in programming languages, and I've implemented
    several toy languages in my two years of programming. My latest (now
    abandoned) language project was SdlJr, avaliable at
    http://www.w00tism.net/sdljr . I never finished it, and I'm certain
    that it's not the best language implementation ever, but I think I can
    safely say that I did a better job than the writer of D++.



  • <font face="Arial">My favorite function is this one:</font>

    <font face="Courier New">Public Function isMathThingy(Thingy As String) As Boolean
        isMathThingy = False
        
        If IsOperator(Thingy) Then isMathThingy = True
        If IsNumeric(Thingy) Then isMathThingy = True

    End Function

    <font face="Arial">And my favorite comment must be one of these:

    <font color="#008000" face="Courier New">'this is the master solver</font>

    <font color="#008000" face="Courier New">'NOTE TO SELF: ADD F_WRITE AND F_READ
    '(if you can read this and you're not azure then yell at him!!)

    </font><font color="#008000" face="Courier New">'k it's either a number or invalid, let someone else handle it :)

    </font><font color="#008000" face="Courier New">'this is a cheat beacause of some gay bug in VB</font>

    <font color="#000000">
             -dZ.
    </font></font></font>



  • @felix said:

    True, but anyone knows it. No one is going to advertise one's "mad coding skillz" over that.

    They won't?  You don't read enough resumes.  There are a vast swarm of undergrads & self-taughts who think that.  Self-delusion is a giant problem in the industry.

    @felix said:

    @CodeWhisperer said:
    In a few years, he might write a useful language

    Like what?

    I don't know, ask him in a few years. 

    @felix said:

    But I'm wary of people who'd rather build things no-one is likely to need, as opposed to useful software.

    Ah, the Useful police.  

    One presumes that he wrote his bedraggled language to serve his own needs -- thus, it's useful.  Not particularly smart, but it seems to serve his limited needs. 

    So...he had a problem, and he wrote some code to address that problem.  And, more than that,  he said "what I really need is a language so I can address many different problems".  So far, that's pretty good thinking.  Poorly conceived, poorly executed, but give the guy a break, he's 17.

    In a year or two, when he goes to apply for a job, and he's up against other candidates -- when the interviewer says "you don't have much professional experience, what kind of things do you work on on your own" and he says "Well, I wrote my own language..." guess where that scores compared to "I built some web pages that talk to a database"?  

    And, not to go too far off the deep end, but since when did 'useful' become the primary measure for a non-professional programmer?  Did you ever take a college level math class and have to grunt your way through 100 integrals in a problem set?  Was it 'useful'?  Were you solving some specific real-world problem as you worked your way through those 100?  Or were you being drilled on the basics?  

    Not everything has to be 'useful' to be a good use of your time, especially when you're just learning.  Hell, even getting the right answer isn't necessarily as important as exposure to the concepts at this point; he's a student, not a professional.   Now, if he's lucky, someone will give him books on data structures and on C#/Java/a real language and maybe his next version will suck less and actually become 'useful'.  

    Is he being a bit silly in publishing this publicly at this point?  Sure.  But he's pleased with himself and his creation (and doesn't yet know enough not to be), so let him have his fun.  It's not like anyone serious is going to adopt his language (...I hope...).

    -cw



  • I think I'm in agreement with CodeWhisperer. He's not trying to build a useful language; he apparently wrote it to learn. Even if the language is poorly executed, it's a good thing that he's interested enough to try. If he implemented this for money, I'd say, "WTF," but as it stands, I think this is in the wrong forum.



    If you were to judge me on some of the things I wrote to learn, I'd be considered a REALLY poor programmer. When I was 14, I wrote a program to find the determinant and inverse of an NxN matrix in Pascal [old DOS pascal]. It dumped source code out to disk, made some modifications, and recompiled itself if the matrix was larger than a certain size. Poor design, but I learned a lot from it. A very important part of learning what to do is learning what NOT to do. It's when the person isn't doing something to learn that we read about it on this site.






    As for useful...

    Hello everybody out there using minix -

    I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
    professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
    since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
    things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
    (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
    among other things).

    I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
    This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
    I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
    are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)

    Linus (torva...@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

    PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
    It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
    will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.


  • @CodeWhisperer said:

    In a year or two, when he goes to apply for a job, and he's up against other candidates -- when the interviewer says "you don't have much professional experience, what kind of things do you work on on your own" and he says "Well, I wrote my own language..." guess where that scores compared to "I built some web pages that talk to a database"?  


    Chances are he will rather apply for a job that involves web pages that talk to a database than one that involves writing a language.



  • @ammoQ said:


    Chances are he will rather apply for a job that involves web pages that talk to a database than one that involves writing a language.

    There are a lot more jobs for people who can tackle big problems than there are people who can actually tackle them well.  He might be 10 years away from being one of those people, but he's one step closer than a lot of coders his age.  

    -cw



  • There's something to be said for the people who want to give the kid a
    break. I tried to write a language the first year I started
    programming, and it was just godawful. Really atrocious. A few years
    later I learned yacc and tried again and did quite a bit better.
    Everybody should do it. It's one of the coolest things programming has
    to offer.



    Here's the thing, though: The guy's been writing code since 1999.
    He ought to be well beyond anything as dumb as this. And you'd think if
    he wants to develop languages, he'd learn C or C++, which are actually suitable
    for the task (as some smartass said on comp.lang.c back in the upper
    Devonian, "You could write a C compiler in Basic, but it'd be a lot more fun to write a Basic compiler in C". That's a paraphrase, sorry).



    He's been thrashing away at this hideous monstrosity for seven years
    without calling it a learning experience and starting over. That's
    about six and a half years too long for an adult to putz around with a
    fundamentally unsalvageable mess. Okay, he was twelve when he started,
    but that was 1999. He's in college now. There's no excuse.
    Nevertheless, he still hasn't
    learned a real language, has never heard of yacc,
    and is just starting to wonder dimly about maybe using a
    microscopically less lethally moronic data structure for his Keystone
    Kops clusterfuck of a symbol table -- without actually addressing the
    brain-curdling stupidity of the design. After seven years, that's how
    far he's gotten.



    Yeah, he's an idiot. Kick him to your heart's content. He almost
    certainly deserves it, and if he doesn't, it won't kill him. Probably
    won't kill him anyway, though we can always hope.



    "All variables are stored as strings." Arrays added in version 4.



    Moron.



  • Okay, I'll cut him a speck of slack here: He's gluing his script crap onto a stub executable
    that feeds it to the interpreter, and calling it a "compiler". That's
    something real people have actually done. I'm not saying they were real
    proud of it, but they at least admitted to it in public.



    And he claims to know C++. Yeah, well, I'll believe that when I see it.




  • @Edgar Plonk said:

    Here's the thing, though: The guy's been writing code since 1999.

    When he was...10?   Well damn him for not having figured out data structures on his own while his voice was cracking...

    ...and that paper-mache volcano he made for science class didn't look anything like a real volcano, there goes his career as a geologist.



  • Do you guys notice a trend here? We all wrote our share of stupid
    little programs when we were 14 or so, but today we know how poor
    and/or useless they were. We wouldn't show them to anyone now, work on them now or claim they are "becomming more and more useful for everyday use" (not my misspelling).





    TheDauti: at least your Turbo Pascal code was ingenious. Don't laugh: self-rewriting programs were common in the old days. As for Linus' original announce: "This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want." He never meant Linux to be a toy.


    CodeWhisperer: you have a point with your "useful vs. not useful" argument. But if he really needed a programming language, he had hundreds to choose from, including obscure and/or weird ones if that's what he wanted. On a related note: when you're 10, nobody minds if your papier mache volcano doesn't look like one. When you're about to attend geology in university, you'd better know what a real volcano is like. As I enjoy saying: I was a stupid kid too, but I grew up for God's sake!



  • Some more WTFs, straight from the about page.


    D++ is not just a little string parser that does
    basic commands. It can support things such as variables (including
    arrays), if statements, do/for loops, functions, and much much more.


    Gee, just like Pascal, Basic, Logo...

    D++ is extremely flexible in the way it works so that it flows like any other programming language.


    As I was saying :D

    A simple "Hello World" application can have only one line of code.


    Like in dozens of scripting languages. Yes, there are dozens. See http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/

    D++ is an open source application. [...]

    • You must contact me before you use the code.
    • You must change the syntax if you are creating your own language from this.
    • You must print my name and website in the about dialog, crediting the code you used.
    • You may not profit from D++ source code or ideas in any way.


    This guy has no idea what open source means. http://www.opensource.org/ anyone?

    Everyone, raise your hand if you think Mr. Smith never did any research...



  • I think you are missing the point. This is no professional selling his scripting language. From the front-page post on 05-11-2006:

    "One policy that I strictly follow is that the examples I post here come from professionals."

    I think for a 17 year old who is probably doing this in his spare time away from school, any form of an interpreter/compiler/scripting language is excellent and quite a learning experience. Of course it won't measure up to somebody who's had years of CS classes and years of programming experience in an honest to goodness software company.

    I wrote a BASIC to x86 assembly compiler (or translator if you prefer) in C++ when I was in high school. It was my second project in learning C++. Did it suck? Certainly. I look back on the code I wrote and shudder. Did I learn from it? Absolutely. Was it pointless? Of course not. While others where playing games, I was getting experience. You can argue what I was hacking together wasn't real experience but I'd differ: some of the most important programming experiences I learned there. Persistance, how to debug, how to figure out a method of implementing an idea, etc. Just because the result is "crappy" doesn't mean the processes was worthless. Now in college, I'm working on machine vision research, writing a pipeline threaded interpreter to run algorithms over a live video stream without having to re-compile my C++ source code. Will I look back at this and shudder at the work I'm doing now? Probably, but it certainly saves me a bundle of time and teaches me a lot of low-level optimizations and OS internals.

    Actually, the implications that this is a WTF is pretty meaningless to me. I mean, is it a WTF if a kid writes a crappy paper in high school? Of course not, it's part of the learning process. Would you compare a high-school kid's paper to a best-seller's latest novel? I certainly wouldn't. I don't expect somebody who hasn't graduated high school to be in the same league as a professional book writer, nor would I expect somebody without training to write software with the same quality as a professional software engineer. I freely admitt that I'm biased, but I would encourage him rather than make fun of his code.




  • (Attempting to) writ(e)ing a language is indeed very instructive. No need for it to be useful, the attempt alone serves its own purpose.

    I never got round at attempting a compiled or scripted language so a thumbs up at this guy. I just did a very basic assembler + emulator but even that was very insightfull.

    From that point of view, the guy may have learned a lot (one hopes).

    The thing that set me off dubbing was the fact that, apparently, after a few years of coding, he (still?) seemed to be amazed at 'the amount of combinations one can make using mathematical operators'.

    I would have assumed that after, say, a few weeks of programming, you don't even *think* about those kinds of things anymore, right?

    As you learn your 'amazing discovery threshold' rises - it takes more for you to think "wow, I didn't know you could do things like *that*!?".



  • @felix said:



    TheDauti: at least your Turbo Pascal code was ingenious. Don't laugh: self-rewriting programs were common in the old days. As for Linus' original announce: "This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want." He never meant Linux to be a toy.


    Linux wasn't initially planned to be an operating system. It was planned to be my personal project to learn about my computer, the CPU. Because the operating system is the program that interfaces directly with the CPU, it was fairly natural to progress from testing what the CPU can do to developing an operating system.


    His reason for release was different, but still not as a functional product:
    Originally Linux was just something I had done, and making it available was mostly a "look at what I've done - isn't this neat?" kind of thing.

    It doesn't really matter, though. There are plenty of examples of useful software that started as, "I wanted to learn more about x.xx." The ones that don't make it are eventually sown over with salt, generally with the writer's blessing. I'm pretty lenient on people writing something to learn with. I still do it, from time to time, when I learn a new language or library.

    This isn't a WTF. It's a kid [Oh, GOD, now I feel old], with no formal background, who is spending his own time learning about programming by building something he thinks is interesting. And I can say, for myself, I certainly had my own delusions that my applications were "becomming more and more useful for everyday use", though my spelling mistakes at that age were never quite that egregarious. That came later. I also wrote a password protection scheme used by my school when I was about that age that I thought was useful. I won't discuss methodologies here, people might be eating. It involved QBasic and a bunch of batch files, though.

    If he was 40, with a bit of a formal background, I'd probably consider it a WTF, though I'd reflect on it a bit first, since the express intent was for him to learn more.



  • @CodeWhisperer said:

    @ammoQ said:


    Chances are he will rather apply for a job that involves web pages that talk to a database than one that involves writing a language.

    There are a lot more jobs for people who can tackle big problems than there are people who can actually tackle them well.  He might be 10 years away from being one of those people, but he's one step closer than a lot of coders his age.  

    -cw


    True, but this guy seems to be a wheel-reinventer. Such people tackle big problems already solved by others.


  • So, this D++ project by a 17 year old kid is not a WTF.

    But do you know what would be a WTF? A WTF would be if we see some professional company write a serious application in D++...



  • @Edgar Plonk said:

    "All variables are stored as strings." Arrays added in version 4.



    Moron.



    From the 1995 ANSI/ISO standard for M[umps], which is the de facto
    standard DBMS in healthcare in the U.S., and is apparently widely used
    abroad as well... A product that has been in use for nearly 40 years,
    and is so deeply entrenched that, despite its warts, will likely never
    be replaced ...


    2.5 Data types

    The M Language Specification defines a single data type, namely, variable length character strings. Contexts which demand a numeric, integer, or truth value interpretation are satisfied by unambiguous rules for mapping a string datum into a number, integer, or truth value.

    The implementor is not limited to any particular internal representation. Any internal representation(s) may be employed as long as all necessary mode conversions are performed automatically and all external behavior agrees with the M Language Specification. For example, integers might be stored as binary integers and converted to decimal character strings whenever an operation requires a string value.

    Speaking from experience, that unambiguous mapping frequently doesn't work quite right ...

    By the way, the Real WTF™ is that I'm on my third identity ... After realizing that I was an imposter as JohnSmallberries, I became John YaYa.  Now, I can't seem to get John YaYa to log in, so ...

    FRIST POST!  :)
    But highlighting seems to still not be working, at least with firefox.


  • i like how all of yall keep saying, "give him a break hes only 17."

    1) He's 18 now

    2) He hasn't work more than a day on this since he was 12

    3) What projects have y'all (on your own) done that have grown a community anywhere near as big as the pagemac community?



  • @llama boy said:

    i like how all of yall keep saying, "give him a break hes only 17."

    1) He's 18 now

    2) He hasn't work more than a day on this since he was 12

    3) What projects have y'all (on your own) done that have grown a community anywhere near as big as the pagemac community?


    You realise the people who're saying "give him a break" are defending him..?


    I'm gonna agree this isn't a WTF, even if only because I've done it myself. Implementing your own programming/scripting language is great fun and a good learning experience. I've tried it a few times, using Python no less. I knew it wasn't the best tool for the job, and I knew that it was completely useless, but I did it anyway for the experience.

    Now I stick to inventing esoteric languages.


  • @felix said:


    D++ is an open source application. [...]

    • You must contact me before you use the code.
    • You must change the syntax if you are creating your own language from this.
    • You must print my name and website in the about dialog, crediting the code you used.
    • You may not profit from D++ source code or ideas in any way.


    This guy has no idea what open source means. http://www.opensource.org/ anyone?

    Everyone, raise your hand if you think Mr. Smith never did any research...



    Actually, I don't see any specific clause in here that excludes it from the open source definition. There are some extremely unusual clauses, but I think it's still open-soure. (Of course, IANAL.)


  • @jesuswaffle said:

    Actually, I don't see any specific clause in here that excludes it from
    the open source definition. There are some extremely unusual clauses,
    but I think it's still open-soure. (Of course, IANAL.)

    <font size="1">You don't have to be a lawyer if you can read.  For example:

    D++: "You may not profit from D++ source code or ideas in any way."
    Open source: "
    The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in</font><font size="1">
    a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program
    from being used in a business [...] we want </font><font size="3"><font size="1">commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it." (OSD clause 6)

    (Yes, this means the use of the source code in a business, not just the compiled program.)
    </font></font>



  • Wow, I can't believe we've stooped to mocking a teenage, non-professional programmer here.

    At his age, I was busy writing a shitty remake of "Spy Hunter" with horrible renditions of my friend's cars and trying to get girls to like me.

    Of course he's going to re-invent the wheel, he's a kid.  That's how he's going to learn.  Anyone with the ambition and desire to implement their own programming lanague, while still in high school, is most likely going to grow up to be a much better programmer than the vast majority of the people posting here.

    I love these boards, but I find much of this thread vaugely sad.



  • @tiro said:



    At his age, I was busy writing a shitty remake of "Spy Hunter" with horrible renditions of my friend's cars and trying to get girls to like me.

    Oh yeah? I know people who were writing 3D game engines at his age. Real 3D engines, not toys.

    @tiro said:

    Of course he's going to re-invent the wheel, he's a kid.  That's how he's going to learn.

    You don't get it, do you? The WTF isn't that he created his own programming language in order to learn. The WTF is that he's still taking this project seriously after 7 years, instead of moving on.

    @tiro said:

    Anyone with the ambition and desire to implement their own programming lanague, while still in high school, is most likely going to grow up to be a much better programmer than the vast majority of the people posting here.

    Ambition and desire alone can't get you far. Neither can work whitout a plan and a goal. Oh and, you don't know how good a programmer I am. Or how bad, for that matter.


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