I’ve always enjoyed reading Amit Singh’s articles dealing with the nitty gritty technical aspects of OS X on his website kernelthread.com. Recently, however, I ran across something a bit different — his Hanoimania! page. I thought that it was so cool that I needed to share it with you.
Basically, it’s a page containing over 100 implementations to the Towers of Hanoi problem. Maybe you’ve worked up a solution in Python or C before — but what about PostScript, Sendmail, Make, or Autoconf? (Yea, me neither.) This page is an amazing display of “thinking outside the box” and creativity.
If you enjoy reasoning about these sorts of things, you may also enjoy reading about Turing Completeness or esoteric programming languages. Or, if you really want to enlighten yourself, check out Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid from your local library.
What’s the most off the wall programming language you’ve ever used to solve a problem?
Have you seen the 99 Bottles of Beer webpage? This is a collection of printing out the words of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall in various languages.
Of course, I had to check out the Perl solution just to see what they would come up with. Yes, that is a real live actual Perl program, and it does run too.
You need the latest copy of Perl (version 5.8). I think this demonstrates why people both love Perl and hate its guts.
Wow. That Perl program is simply amazing. On esoteric programming: if it took you a long time to write it...it should take someone else an even longer time to figure it out. (j/k)
I've got two for you:
First, I once wrote an adventure-ish type game for the HP41CV calculator - which was amazingly advanced for it's time, what, with it's 10 digit alphanumeric LCD display and 4k of keystroke programming space.
Second, I implemented the "diff" algorithm in Fortran IV. For those of you who aren't of retirement age, Fortran IV was the 1961 version of Fortran and it didn't have a character data type...
There's one important difference though between the 99 Bottles of Beer page and Amit Singh's Hanoimania! page. The beer page collects programs submitted by people while Singh himself wrote all the 111 Towers of Hanoi implementation. Different strokes but both sites are amazing!
Good post!!
Hi all!
G'night
Cool