See The Old Days -- ca. 1974 Random Numbers Before Python for some background.
We'll get to Python after reminiscing about the olden days. I want to provide some back story on why sympy has had a huge impact on ordinary hacks like myself.
What we're talking about is how we …
more ...See "The Old Old Days -- ca. 1968" for my first exposure to an actual computer. Nothing about Python there. But. It's what motivated me to get started learning to code -- I was fascinated by games that involved randomization. Games with cards or dice.
After filling in a little background, I …
more ...Why didn't COBOL evolve more successfully?
FORTRAN, OTOH, has survived precisely because it--and more importantly, related tools, esp compilers--has evolved to solve/overcome many (certainly not all!) of the sorts of pain-points you describe, while retaining the significant performance edge that (IMHO, ICBW) prevents challengers …more ...