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Art and code – obscure or beautiful code?
By Therese Hansen | November 21, 2008
Through the ages a lot of interesting (and some obscure) programming languages have entertained and confused people. At JAOO Aarhus 2008 Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel gave a presentation about languages and language constructs in a presentation that is a work of art in itself.
In the presentation called “50 in 50″ you can see Guy Steele rap about APL and later in the video about spelling keywords backwards. The song about God wrote in Lisp code is also a part of the presentation. Among the languages mentioned are APL, Cobol, AP/I, Scheme, IPL-V, AED, Madcap, Piet, SNOBOL, ADA, Algol60, Intercal, Logo, Perligata, Shakespeare, Lucid, Occam, HQ9+, MUMBLE, Rake, Perl and of course Lisp.
A fun, artistic and enlightning presentation full of interesting facts – and who better to do it than Richard P. Gabriel and Guy L. Steele (the great Quux). Nothing more to say than the rallying cry; More cowbell!
Watch the whole presentation here:
November 21st, 2008 at 10:00 pm
[...]For those who like their PL History presented in avante guard beat poetry, a video of Steele & Gabriel’s 50 in 50 speech at JAOO is made to order.[...]
November 21st, 2008 at 10:45 pm
You know, people recording these kinds of things REALLY need to learn two critical facts:
* A densely populated slide should remain on the screen for longer than 1.5 seconds. C’mon!!!! Showing it again after a 5 to 10 second delay (for an additional 3 seconds) is NOT ACCEPTABLE.
* THE BACKS OF THE PRESENTERS IS WORSE THAN DEAD AIR.
C’mon camera-people and editors, wake up!
Otherwise, I enjoyed the presentation. It was . . . unique.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Saw them do this at OOPSLA, think it was 2005 (San Diego) … excellent talk, top-notch – what I’ve come to expect from both of them. Thanks JAOO for posting it.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:55 pm
@Samuel
.
I guess the camera-people was inspired to make the camera-angle a bit more artistic for this presentation
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:00 am
[...] “50 in 50″ November 21st, 2008, 5:00 pm by Mathias “50 in 50″ [...]
November 22nd, 2008 at 11:46 am
[...] http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/11/21/art-and-code-obscure-or-beautiful-code/ [...]
November 29th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Agh. Pretentious drivel.
November 29th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
[...] at JAOO 2008 Posted November 29, 2008 Filed under: Links | Extremely well made presentation about computer languages. I think there is nearly for everyone something he has not seen or heard [...]
January 15th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
I think they should take a better camera man
But the presentation is quite interesting. Guys next time do it better 
February 12th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
This is more funny than educational, but it’s fun anyway. Thanks!
February 27th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
[...] Art and code – obscure or beautiful code? [...]
April 14th, 2009 at 7:11 am
[...] the problem when I tried to play a presentation by Richard P. Gabriel and Guy L. Steele linked in here, and couldn’t hear a thing. At first I thought it might have been a codec issue, so I [...]
April 15th, 2009 at 3:52 am
Cool! Is it possible to post this in a format old computers can play? Like small-format mp3 (not mp4) or YouTube’s low-res format?
July 14th, 2009 at 1:33 am
yes. pretentious and annoying. Way to ruin interesting information.
I guess I prefer my ‘culture’ and ‘art’ outside of CS presentations.
July 20th, 2009 at 3:26 am
[...] http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/11/21/art-and-code-obscure-or-beautiful-code/ fascinating! And well-put-together. [...]
February 7th, 2011 at 4:33 am
[...] Steele made a wonderful piece about programming languages for the JAOO developers conference called 50 in 50. JAOO is an acronym that stands for “Java and Object Orientation” which is a really [...]