Thread: What sort of code would historical figures write?

If computers had been discovered at the dawn of modern humans (and with the assumption that all modern languages came with them, but no other modern technology)...

What sort of programs would famous historical figures be writing? Also, what would your choice/s favorite language be, and why?

Here's some of mine :

---------

Sigmund Freud would write small apps for websites, for evaluating the users personality type. After answering 8 or 9 nebulous sounding questions like "What's the smell of your favorite color?", the user is brought to the results page. The results page displays on a scale of 9-10 how in love with your mother you are. W
ritten in JavaScript.

Kant would write the first turing complete speech synthesizer, called Kant_Talk'in_Now. Unfortunately all the program ever wants to talk to you about is how flawed your logic is. T
he program was written in assembly, and not even Eistein could figure out what was going on with it.

For the immediate bummer, why this idea is bad, as shown by many made up historical facts:

Why go over to a friend's house to play video games when there are Youtube let's plays?
"How can what we see be real if our eyes aren't real" is an actually famous quote by actual philosopher George Berkeley.
Walt Disney would have skipped traditional cells and film altogether.
Henry Ford puts a computer in the Model T.
People who insist on using bank tellers would have only gotten more obnoxious a lot sooner.
The death of radio.
The death of radio even faster with Jerry Wexler's new app called napster.
The death of TV news with the rise of the Onion before Walter Cronkite's career.
The Zapruder film, now spread initially through the Internet, creates a band of annoying, die-hard conspiracy theorists.
Larry King looks even more out of date even faster.
Your favorite President used twitter to get elected, at least according to all of his obnoxious followers.
Kickstarter tried to save Tiger Stadium; it reached many stretch goals, but nothing was achieved due to bureaucracy the project creator didn't think about.
The set of the Price is Right was stuck in the 70s for even longer.
They engraved the moon with the Pepsi logo as the soft drink company funded many space exploration projects.
People still don't believe in the Moon landing, whenever it happened.
Still no updates on warp drive!
Or The Challenger disaster was a disaster of a completely different sort...
Lavos still didn't destroy the world in 1999.

Originally Posted by whiteflags

"How can what we see be real if our eyes aren't real" is an actually famous quote by actual philosopher George Berkeley.

That's like a solipsist, but minus one. A nulipsist.

Originally Posted by Alpo

If computers had been discovered at the dawn of modern humans (and with the assumption that all modern languages came with them, but no other modern technology)...

What sort of programs would famous historical figures be writing? Also, what would your choice/s favorite language be, and why?

This is an broken game. The paths people take in life are so heavily dictated by their environment, that said famous figures would probably have perused different things, so much that their work wouldn't even resemble the answers you give.

Originally Posted by Sebastiani

Of course we can only speculate...but I suspect a whole lot of them would have made exceptional programmers. I mean, imagine if someone like Euler or Kepler had had access to computers back then? Just think!

If Euler or Kepler (and their peers presumably) had access to computers back then, they would never have grown to be the people we remember them to be. Assuming they would have made exceptional programmers is a wild shot in the dark (even for speculation).

Originally Posted by Yarin

If Euler or Kepler (and their peers presumably) had access to computers back then, they would never have grown to be the people we remember them to be. Assuming they would have made exceptional programmers is a wild shot in the dark (even for speculation).

I don't think he meant that Kepler and peers would have made great programmers themselves, just that they could have used computers the way todays scientists do.

Not that I think every great mind would have used computers to do something amazing. Imagine Descartes writing a program to solve his questions about reality :

Code:

I = (think) ? am : NULL;