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Admin
I know this story. I had seen this, a few times, in other places, with other names. A "Guru", a visionary, creates a monstruosity that reeks of Inner Platform Effect and suddenly believes he's a genius destined to revolutionize the world of programming. His own visions of grandeur had shoved his head too far into his arse to understand how useless is what he is doing.
Admin
Was the entire article written around this pun? If so I applaud you
Admin
Hey, the unicorns are back!
Admin
So Cornify now keeps a usage counter in your cookies?
Also, was it SPRIT or SPIRIT?
Admin
Both are misspellings! Correct name was SPIT! :-D
Admin
"The generated C# code read like Franz Kafka on LSD" Hat's off to that line.
Admin
Perhaps it was l'esprit de l'escalier?
Admin
Sigh. That's what happens when you typo "p$!|j4" as "p$|!j4". What else would you expect?
Admin
"GHOST wasn’t terribly funny to use. It terrified Chris. The syntax loved short-hand and unusual special characters, which made it read like the demon offspring of MUMPS and APL. Worse, it wasn’t truly a language in its own right- it compiled down into C#. The generated C# code read like Franz Kafka on LSD, and depended on syntax conventions which had been deprecated in 2003, meaning it depended on .NET 1.1."
I'll grant this paragraph is funny, but it's also so wrong that I'd caution about throwing stones in glass houses. True languages don't have to compile at all, and cross compiling is a legitimate use of a language. "Syntax conventions" in C# have never been deprecated. Even APIs in the BCL have remained backwards compatible. Anything you wrote in C# in 2003 can be compiled on .NET Framework 4.8 with a modern compiler today. I don't doubt GHOST/SPRIT was a nightmare, but this criticism is way off the mark.
Admin
Can I get an elaboration por favor?
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JavaScript, Python, Ruby, et. al. Interpreted languages.
Admin
Okay but what do you mean by calling them "true" languages?
(Also technically some of those are compiled "just-in-time" (JIT), not interpreted.)
Addendum 2022-06-21 12:07: And by some I guess I mean all. PHP added a JIT compiler in version 8, and apparently Ruby (which I don't work with) added it in 2018. I think Perl is one of the few remaining actual interpreted languages.
Admin
The .net Framework is itself obsolete; it is only officially still supported by MS on minimum live support to not upset companies still running ancient pre-core code.
Admin
What does the author mean by "true language"? Ignoring interpreted languages (and I'll grant you that most such languages now are JITed instead, for performance purposes) I can also name a lot of cross compiled languages, such as TypeScript, CoffeScript, et. al. Back in the day a lot of languages, including C++, cross compiled to C. Clojure(Script) cross compiles to JavaScript. F# cross compiles to JavaScript, Python and even Rust today. There's nothing "untrue" about any of those languages.
The .NET Framework runtime has reached end of life, but that doesn't change a thing about what I said. Besides, I doubt this Ghost/SPRIT postdated .NET 5 (when .NET Framework was EOLed). Further, it's likely the C# produced would still compile fine under .NET 6 or even the .NET 7 preview. The "syntax" hasn't broken backwards compatibility even on the .NET Core side. That's mostly true even if you talk about libraries instead of language syntax where .NET Core still has all the .NET 1.1 libraries/APIs.
Admin
Ohhhhh, I see, you're referencing "it wasn’t truly a language in its own right", and saying, "A language can be only transpiled and still truly be a language". Good point!