Im expecting someone to chime in about punch cards
You're too late
in fact, when i was a child my mother used to sew memory. one. bit. at. a. time. ferrite cores, by hand. true story.
BTW, aminorex, I'm interested in looking at Julia. Can you recommend some resources?
not knowing your background its hard to pick something pitched at the right speed. the wikipedia page is a good overview of the features which define its appropriate use cases and has tutorial references. for example, if you know R then this one is probably a quick route:
http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~bates/JuliaForRProgrammers.pdffor me, it was just a matter of recognizing features from languages i already know (or, more accurately, once knew) well. there is not a lot of innovation in the language itself. the attraction for me is that i hate python for its slowness, for the GIL, but need a better alternative for gluing math libraries together, processing unicode text, and distributing computational experiments over networks of gpus, and while julia isn't quite there yet, it seems to be on track to become sufficiently superior to python to compel my conversion - which for me means a minimum bar of about 5x improvement, pragmatic curmudgeon that i am. i think it will be a contender long before 1.0
the other single most interesting language on pragmatic grounds is Rust, which is shaping up to be a viable replacement to c++/java for more systemsy/data-structurey stuff.
