...then C would be a Hammond B-3: the undisputable classic which most 
others at least secretly try to duplicate (but mostly fail). This huge 
beast has literally written history, without it, the world of computing 
hardly would be the same. Users need to be aware that although you can 
do almost anything with it, there is NEITHER a built-in drum machine NOR 
automatic accompaniment so don't expect your results to be too fancy - 
unless you're a seasoned player.

C++ would be a Yamaha Electone GX-1 - a super-sophisticated all-in-one 
machine modeled after the Hammond B-3... but so much more! Original 
spare parts are readily available up to this very day.

Assembler would be a Dr. Böhm CnT/L kit: you have to build literally 
everything from scratch, you are not even spared from the plight of 
soldering! On the other hand, you get a profound insight into what 
electronic organs at all are about, and thus would be able to do most 
repairs on more readily shipped models. But beware of the rickety drawbars!

6502 Assembler: a Dr. Böhm Benjamin kit, you can do hardly anything 
serious with it, but it's a lot of fun and perhaps inspires you to try 
something more sophisticated afterwards, such as a CnT/L...

COBOL: a Mighty Wurlitzer Theater Organ! Not really electronic, but at 
that time, even computers were hardly...

C#: a Wersi OAS model, essentially a PC running Windows XP with some 
organ built around it. Pretends to be a Hammond B-3 but never will be - 
and preferably crashes in the midst of a recital!

Pascal: a Farfisa Maharani. Very B-3ish, albeit somewhat out of fashion 
today.

Turbo Pascal: a Farfisa Pergamon. Even more B-3ish, with a sophisticated 
built-in synthesizer, but did not save the company from being sold out.

Forth: a weird Polish-made organ for left-handed players. Rumours has it 
that Karlheinz Stockhausen owned one.

BASIC: anything Bontempi. Beginner's choice, they come in many flavours 
which do not differ very much from another. Mostly only 37 keys per 
manual, so better stick to good old MS-DOS!

Commodore BASIC V2.0: a Bontempi 370.19 - too bad that there is no bass 
pedal! Is this an organ at all?

Visual BASIC: a Bontempi CZ-1 - cool professional all-black combo organ 
look, but, after all, still only 37 keys per manual. Shunned by most 
earnest programmers!

Logo: a 2-year-old's 8-note toy glockenspiel.

HTML: your own singing voice! Hardly anyone is too unmusical to command 
at least a little... but "programming" is something different!

POV-Ray: not exactly an organ, but a huge Moog modular synth which also 
controls the light show. Opinions on whether playing this thing is fun 
or not are strongly divided among the community...

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

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The only programming languages I use are Javascript, Lua and POV-Ray. I 
took a C# course once, but forgot most of it.


Michael

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Hi(gh)!

On 18.09.2015 03:50, Mike Horvath wrote:
> The only programming languages I use are Javascript, Lua and POV-Ray. I
> took a C# course once, but forgot most of it.

With me, it's C++, PHP, MySQL and of course POV-Ray! I even wrote a 
small POV-Ray script generator in C++, back in 2009... and started 
working on a C++ program which converts SVG graphics to layered POV-Ray 
textures!

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

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> C#: a Wersi OAS model, essentially a PC running Windows XP with some
> organ built around it. Pretends to be a Hammond B-3 but never will be -
> and preferably crashes in the midst of a recital!

C# crash? I think your C or C++ one would be far more likely to crash, 
unless in the hands of an experienced professional.

When I read the subject I was expecting things like brain, eyes etc, not 
pianos!

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Hi(gh)!

On 18.09.2015 11:26, scott wrote:
>> C#: a Wersi OAS model, essentially a PC running Windows XP with some
>> organ built around it. Pretends to be a Hammond B-3 but never will be -
>> and preferably crashes in the midst of a recital!
>
> C# crash? I think your C or C++ one would be far more likely to crash,
> unless in the hands of an experienced professional.
>
> When I read the subject I was expecting things like brain, eyes etc, not
> pianos!
>

Originally, I typed "were electronic organs" - but a Hammond B-3 (like 
any tonewheel Hammond) is not truly electronic (rather 
electro-magnetic), much less a Mighty Wurlitzer, which is a traditional 
pipe organ!

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

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On 18/09/2015 10:26 AM, scott wrote:
> C# crash? I think your C or C++ one would be far more likely to crash,
> unless in the hands of an experienced professional.

On the other hand, the Mono implementation of C# was some wonderful bugs.

Like an implementation of ConcurrentQueue that only works correctly if 
used from one thread.

Or a bug where the implementation leaks process handles until you cannot 
launch any more processes.

Or that wonderful one where after a while, the Mono runtime receives 
SIGABRT for trying to map too many memory regions. What happens is that 
as the garbage collector frees empty memory pages, the address space 
slowly fragments, until you hit the maximum map limit. With a 
compile-time switch (i.e., you have to recompile the entire Mono 
platform from source), you can switch off free page releasing. At which 
point the runtime instead crashes due to exhausting all available memory...

I particularly enjoyed the time we tried to put out a release, and we 
have 3 versions of Mono to choose between, each one of which contained a 
different show-stopping bug. That was a fun meeting.

...why no, I'm not bitter. Why do you ask? :-P

All of this, of course, has little to do with C# as such, and is all to 
do with Mono specifically.

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On 17/09/2015 05:41 PM, "Jörg \"Yadgar\" Bleimann" wrote:

If programming languages were organs... then I would be seriously 
amazing at playing organs? :-D

> 6502 Assembler: a Dr. Böhm Benjamin kit, you can do hardly anything
> serious with it, but it's a lot of fun and perhaps inspires you to try
> something more sophisticated afterwards, such as a CnT/L...

What, you haven't tried Motorola 68000 assembly?

(I still can't figure out why nobody else designed their processors like 
this. You know, *logical*.)

> COBOL: a Mighty Wurlitzer Theater Organ! Not really electronic, but at
> that time, even computers were hardly...

What, no LISP?

> C#: a Wersi OAS model, essentially a PC running Windows XP with some
> organ built around it. Pretends to be a Hammond B-3 but never will be -
> and preferably crashes in the midst of a recital!

C# is about level with Java; it depends what implementation you're 
running it on.

> Forth: a weird Polish-made organ for left-handed players. Rumours has it
> that Karlheinz Stockhausen owned one.

What, no Haskell?

(Then again, if C# is a Wersi OAS and COBOL is a Wurlitzer, then I guess 
that makes Haskell some sort of pneumatic keytar...)

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> All of this, of course, has little to do with C# as such, and is all to
> do with Mono specifically.

Now you see if Mono was open-source, you (or anyone else) could fix 
these bugs yourself :-)

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COBOL a theather organ?  Then no doubt Lisp is a cathedral organ where the best
fugues and preludes were played. ;)

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On 21/09/2015 07:51 AM, scott wrote:
>> All of this, of course, has little to do with C# as such, and is all to
>> do with Mono specifically.
>
> Now you see if Mono was open-source, you (or anyone else) could fix
> these bugs yourself :-)

Hah. Haha. Ahahahahaha! You're funny. ;-)

My college was just looking at the Mono build infrastructure; he says 
the build has been broken in their CI system since January... Man, if 
even the official Mono developers can't fix their own CI server... damn.

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