what is the most amazing program that you have used ?what amazed you the most about that program?

To briefly summarize, META-II is a language in which you can write an executable specification for a programming language. This is sometimes called a “meta-compiler” or a “compiler-compiler”, and it’s not an uncommon thing in the world of programming languages.

What’s so baffling about it, is that the compiler for the language itself, was written in just a few dozen lines of code in the language itself.

In other words: this is a programming language for writing programming languages, written in just a few dozen lines of the same programming language.

This was invented in the early 60’s, so compare this with modern meta-compilers, which are typically in the order of hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and were typically written in a general-purpose programming language such as C or Java.

There is something deeply fascinating to me, about being able to create something extremely valuable and powerful, without creating something incredibly complex.

(Perhaps, more than anything, I find it staggering how little attention was given to this apparently brilliant idea. It appears to be somewhat of a curiosity and a historical artifact, for example, is isn’t generally taught or studied universities, and appears to have been given little attention in recent time…)

Balbastrelalaineviz Balbastrelalaineviz · Answer 2

Answer:

Auto complete of Visual Studio is my favorite one. It's one step behind actually coding for you. The first time I realized that “auto implement my enumerable knterface through this local variable” thing was just the peak point for me. This is so naively thought, I don't know if other IDEs have this but most IDEs have some level of completion, that I know. It's just this idea of making it even deeper got me. Immediately sent a smiley with a screenshot. Honestly this isn't what you expect to be the most amazing piece of software at the first glance, I don't feel like it is right now as I've used it many times after I realized there was such a thing. But it is that moment when you actually realise this, it is like a surprise, and you are amazed that this was actually thought for you.

Overall I see Visual Studio as the most well designed software in terms of my own user experience. I and most people obviously did not try everything, doesn't seem possible as well to do that, but I really am conservative about my choices, so Microsoft really got me with VS. I want to try other things though, maybe only to be aware of them. For example I really wonder the Linux infrastructure, I got a long rong ahead for understanding it, so that's a little bit far from now. For now and for me, it is VS, as a baby that did not see the outer world yet.