Late in the novel The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha, a character considers his options:
He couldn't return to spending all day in a cubicle, punching lines of Python into an IDE...
Now, I have written a fair bit of Python over the last twenty years, but rather little of it in an Integrated Development Environment or IDE. Generally I have used emacs as my editor, and found that worked well enough. Such VB.NET and C# as I have written I have written in the Visual Studio IDE, and could not have written without it.
I wonder what IDE the man used in his cubicle days. These would have been in the few years before 2009, and I'm not sure what the choices were. Visual Studio Tools for Python didn't come out until 2011, and my impression that NetBeans supported Python seems to be just wrong. Let's say that it was IDLE, the Independent Development and Learning Environment. IDLE is a fine tool, if not especially flashy as IDEs go, and it has been around since 2000.
And I find the expression "punching lines of Python" curious. Long ago in college I punched lines of Fortran IV into cards, and had the option of punching them into paper tape. But never since have I thought of my typing as punching. I have heard at least one person talk of "slinging COBOL". Still I think most coders just say "write".
You missed your vocation as a fiction line editor
ReplyDeleteEditing fiction line by line might be worse than punching Python into an IDE, who knows? The sentence makes sense in its context, but I do often enjoy writing Python, and so was amused.
DeleteMy dad, who began his career as a programmer with punch cards at IBM, always used (and I think still uses) the stately sounding "key in" to describe any sort of typing. When I was learning to program in the mid-1980s, he greatly disliked youthful exhortations to "hit" a key.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've heard "key in" much. Perhaps I mostly heard it while working for a company that made typesetting systems.
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