The Shape of Code

T is for TECO, Tcl/Tkl and TeX.

TECO was present during creation and begat Emacs. Despite living on TECO’s home turf, as an undergraduate, my lack of beard and disdain for Dungeons & Dragons stopped me becoming a member of its inner sanctum.

Tcl/Tkl is practical combination of scripting language+GUI toolkit for adding a usable (if sometimes somewhat fragile) GUI wrapper around one or more command line programs. Tcl is one of those languages that gets the job done without anyone making a big fuss about it.

TeX is Donald Knuth’s original typesetting system, however the language built on top of it, LaTeX, is probably more well known these days. While creating TeX Knuth proposed an approach to combing code and documentation together and gave it the catchy name literate programming; unfortunately this approach was not strangled at birth and because of Knuth’s reputation and the catchy name it keeps regrowing heads that need to be cut-off. The literate programming approach requires code, comments and formatting instructions be jumbled together in a horrendous mess, which is then feed through a process that can produce visually beautiful output (if enough effort is put into inserting the appropriate incantations into the horrendous mess). When writing something that will primarily be read at the beautiful output stage it is worth investing in the horrendous mess stage, but most code is used in its native, horrendous mess, form. Knuth has the mathematician’s habit of using single letter identifiers and love of ‘neat’ tricks, he would be a disaster on any software engineering project where he could not be left alone in a room producing code that nobody ever needs to touch.