Introductions

My first blog isn't really a good place for coding, so I've fired this one up.

It's sort of interesting that blogspot has so many good blog names taken up by bloggers who never made a post or who haven't made a post in years.

Anyway, I chose the name "Left Curly Brace" ironically. This style of coding, made popular by the badly designed and poorly spec'ed C language--did I mention I have strong opinions about this sort of thing?--has come to dominate the programming world. Any new language, if it's going to take off, has to look like a math teacher vomited.

{
if(!happy)
toughLuck();
}

I prefer the cleaner English of Pascal (or PL/I or BASIC):

if not happy then ToughLuck;

Smalltalk's a little stranger to read, but it makes good, logical sense:

(self happy) ifFalse: [self toughLuck].

Anyway, it's not just C's syntax that makes it awful--some day when I have time and am feeling feisty, I'll go through K&R and explain why it's so bad--and we'll be using left-curlies here because, hell, you can't hardly help these days. The curly braces won.

If you're going to be a good programming polyglot, you gotta be comfortable with the C-style.

I've got various projects I want to do, and that I want to make available to others for their use. Ultimately, I don't know how many languages I'll be using, but you can expect to see Pascal, BASIC, Smalltalk, PHP and Actionscript just for starters. Yes, even C is likely, as is C++.

I hope you'll find the entries interesting and useful.