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Have you had your thyroid levels tested? My problem was mostly hypothyroidism.

The C Programming Language for pointers, which didn't make any sense to me in Pascal.

Thank you!

I was laid off from Eazel when their funding fell through in the 2001 dot-com crash. The founders were ex-Apple people and they arranged for Apple to interview those of us who had been laid off. I wasn't hired, but the people who did get jobs there made Safari. I spent the next few months at the library and watching my bank balance dwindle away, until some of my other former coworkers were hired at Danger and got me an interview there.

In my case it was hypothyroidism. See a doctor.

"3990 Old Town Avenue, San Diego" is permanently burned into my brain. I was finally in that neighborhood about 10 years ago and visited the shrine myself, even though any evidence of the company there is long gone now.

If only these sorts of workarounds really worked when your brain doesn't have enough of the right chemicals. "Can't make myself do the thing" turns out to be called ADHD, and T3+T4 thyroid treatment and Adderall have helped me.

Types and especially structured types. https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

Semicolons came in with Algol 58 too, which used them in what now seems like a really excessive way.

Thanks. My major public project for map utilities has been Tippecanoe, https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe

That was a common convention at the time and you can also see it in early BASIC manuals.

For is also from Algol, replacing "do" from Fortran. I agree it would be interesting to know why the word was chosen, but I think it comes from the mathematical "for all x in Y, x > 5" or whatever other assertion is being made.

Thanks. It has been cited as confusing in sources like The Elements of Programming Style, but I can appreciate that it may feel natural to some people, and there are certainly cases like strcmp() where a three-way distinction is necessary, and current languages lack a good way to talk about it.

I was a linguistics major in college and therefore am a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist about language. When I say I cannot say this, I mean that this construct does not exist in the ordinary dialect that I speak, in the same way that I can say "that doesn't need washed" even though speakers of many other dialects have to say "washing" instead. If it is in someone else's dialect, they can feel free to say it, but my experience is that it is rare.

Actually, no, you are right: I seem to have received one email message that begins a sentence with "else" in 1996 and another in 2003. So it is not unknown to me, but it is quite rare.

This is a usage that I have no memory of ever encountering in any context other than computer programming. It may be in some dialects, but not in ones I have come in conscious contact with.

Algol was not prone to abbreviation. Algol 58 used "or if," so if they had wanted "or else," they would have used "or else."

Looks like this article was the source of the Twitter thread https://twitter.com/geoffwozniak/status/1337916048276852737 where I revived the discussion of my talk.

I said I can't say it, not that no one can say it. It is not in my dialect.

Thanks for the insider German knowledge!

I am the author, and I mean that I can say "or else" in a normal sentence, but I cannot say "else" without an "or" in normal speech in my normal dialect.

My scan of the print edition (kindly mailed to me many years ago by Doug McIlroy), which includes the historical manpages as well as the commentary: https://archive.org/details/research-unix-reader/

Also A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter Salus, https://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:q...

Whoever wrote the web interface to "p4 blame" at Danger called it "See who made these codes," which always sounded super weird to me

Later versions of Research Unix I believe reserved another standard file descriptor for /dev/tty so it wouldn't have to have magic knowledge.

Thanks. Yes, I made these maps several years ago.

It wasn't just songs they all knew from memory. There was a widely issued monthly publication, the Army/Navy Hit Kit, later the Armed Forces Song Folio, that provided them with eight pop songs and one four-part chorus arrangement per issue, with additional booklets of song lyrics for singalongs.

He and Peter Samson gave the Spacewar demo last August 4th, on the Vintage Computer Festival day.

Traffic signal green is already optimized for colorblindness: the green looks white, so it is unambiguously distinguished from red and yellow. What do you propose as better?

"We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems." http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html