The Internet Meme Timeline 235
CNet pointed out a great use of timeline creation site "Dipity" that has resulted a timeline of internet fads and memes. While there are some subtle inaccuracies and a few notable omissions, it seems to have touched on most of the big stuff. Everything from GOTO being considered harmful to "the website is down," it's a great trip down memory lane if you don't mind a few speedbumps like the goatse guy.
signed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Any information there yet on the slashdot "signed" tag meme?
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
GOTO being evil wasn't just a meme. When I took Intro to Computer Science in college in 1984, the course was in FORTRAN. I was informed that GOTO's led to unstructured code and that any project we handed in with a GOTO in it would receive a score of zero, as would any test on which we used one to solve a problem.
GOTO Considered Harmful predates the internet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:2, Interesting)
I went thru CS/Programming coursework before the GoTo instruction was banned by those who "knew better" and I found GoTo to be one of the most powerful and useful of instructions - but with this power and utility there came an enormous responsibility on the programmer to carefully choose and specify the arguments needed.
With practice, I even frequently used GoTo statements with "calculated" destinations (which were fraught with even more possible ways to go wrong) to allow the construction of code using only a small fraction of the lines of code (say 25 to 30 percent) otherwise required.
Of course, with this use of the GoTo instruction any program debugging was even more difficult - and I became expert at reading core-dumps in octal. And, yes, it was difficult for most to understand the logic of the algorithm/program flow, as it required a feel for how the instructions were actually solved, and what the characteristics were for allowable, and disallowed, results.
But these days, none of us can use this and other powerful programming techniques, because many could not learn to use them withour catastrophic failures - and could not refrain from trying to use them even though they had previously failed to do so successfully.
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't forget that things like break and continue are also gotos with funny sounding names.
Even Dijkstra, the author of Go To Statements Considered Harmful, wrote "Please don't fall into the trap of thinking I am terribly dogmatic about the go to statement. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline."
It DOES run on linux... (Score:2, Interesting)
netcraft confirms! it does run on linux
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=dipity.com [netcraft.com]