jz391

One point mentioned in the first link you included is support of $ORIGIN in #! scripts - that would need kernel support.

I think many of us miss that feeling... For me, the level of complexity of the computers in my childhood (TRS-80, Spectrum) made them interesting but still possible to fully understand. I think we have lost that - modern hardware and software has complexity on a scale which makes it impossible to fully follow. After decades of computing, I only have a high-level understanding of many components of a typical PC. So for my son, any understanding of what's going will be difficult...

I do understand it takes effort to stop and re-accelerate, but isn't making effort (exercise) part of the purpose of cycling in the first place? My main objection is to cyclist failing to stop at pedestrian crossing lights: as a pedestrian, when I see a green light, I expect to cross without having to dodge moving vehicles on the road. I do check the the road to make sure that cars have stopped, but cyclists (who rarely stop at crossings, at least in London) are harder to see, as they are smaller and often obscured by the traffic.

Definitely agree with the sentiment (also a Speccy 48K guy), but at the risk of being pedantic, I think you're double-counting: "million times faster" is for one Spectrum, the "0.000625% price" is for a million...

Braces are substitution, so

  b{a/x}

  k = ... (λx.b) a ...

  k = ... c ...

I think Tk(x) denotes "the definition of variable k is expression x" and the square brackets are "k[x]" something like "in the context of definition k, value of expression x". So I suspect that

  a=Tk(x)
  a[y]

  (λk.y)x

I wouldn't call it "exceptionally nice"

I guess depends on your reference point :-) I recall in the beginning, python offering an easier/more readable alternative to Perl, which itself was a step up from awk/sed/sh script (for the tasks/uses GP mentions)

Reminds me of a commercial project I did for my old University department around 1994. The GUI was ambitious and written in Motif, which was a little buggy and leaked memory. So... I ended up catching any SEGVs, saving state, and restarting the process, with a short message in a popup telling the user to wait. Obviously not guaranteed, but surprisingly it mostly worked. With benefit of experience & hindsight, I should have just (considerably) simplified it: I had user-configurable dialogs creating widgets on the fly etc, none of which was really required.

The key issue is that Lisp's minimal uniform syntax has less variation to help with visual pattern matching, which we humans are good at (compared to richer syntax).

The meta-programming power of Lisp may be largely due to being homoiconic, although Dylan/Julia etc achieve similar without it. However Lisp's minimal syntax is not a prerequisite for homoiconicity: S-Plus/R has a more conventional syntax while retaining "code is a list" representation.

To extend your analogy: if the house is a listed building (UK concept; apparently US equivalent is listed in National Register of Historic Places), by law you cannot just tear it down. You need to do much more work to renovate what can be done without disturbing the original structure. This obviously costs much more and is generally done by different specialists, who have harder job and hence are better paid. So the question comes back to: what kind of work do you want to do...

And, of course, the next level of procrastination is to develop your own programming language, which you will use to write the engine to use in creating the game :-) Definitely hats off to Jon for pulling it off - he had a lot of focus and some previous experience - and it also helps to have re$ource$ from past successful games. For many of us, the lure of developing better tools, rather than the end product, proves to be too strong to resist. At least Jon stopped short of developing own OS :-)

True for many, but I actually have been acquiring some computing books I had enjoyed reading in my youth (e.g. Organick's Multics). Perhaps living permanently abroad strengthens nostalgia...

Interesting. The voice used for the pronunciation sound seems to be using the wrong language though (FYI using Firefox).

Absolutely. As an Electrical Engineer turned software guy, Ohm's/Kirchhoff's laws remain as valid and significant as when I was taught them 35 years ago. For software however, growth of hardware architectures/constraints made it possible to add much more functionality. My first UNIX experience was on PDP-11/44, where every process (and kernel) had access to an impressive maximum of 128K of RAM (if you figured out the flag to split address and data segments). This meant everything was simple and easy to follow: the UNIX permission model (user/group/other+suid/sgid) fit it well. ACLs/capabilities etc were reserved for VMS/Multics, with manuals spanning shelves.

Given hardware available to an average modern Linux box, it is hardly surprising that these bells and whistles were added - someone will find them useful in some scenarios and additional resource is negligible. It does however make understanding the whole beast much, much harder...

Indeed. Coming from UNIX tools (sed/awk/sh/grep/tr etc), perl had a lot of appeal and almost intuitive syntax - alternatives in the '80s being C, awk, or if you were unlucky, FORTRAN IV without string type :-). The benefit of having a single language with all of the functionality of these tools was amazing at the time and ability to use familiar syntax was a benefit. However expectations for programming languages grew somewhat since...

Does anyone have experience using any of these for scientific paper PDFs, in particular containing equations (I'm guessing graphs are still well beyond their reach)? The workflow for these seems to involve converting PDF->text...

Could be worse of course: Multics (the first system with hierarchical names) used greater-than (>) as separator. Unix/DOS use of slashes gives us the sane pipeline/redirection syntax we all love (see [1] for the Multics redirection syntax).

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7030/why-...

I understand what you mean (although I "grew up" on UNIX, don't find this a problem); however, it would be better if the long (i.e. readable) options were prefixed by double dash to follow usual UNIX convention.

Using single dash for single character options allows you to combine them, which is really useful (if you do remember these options of course), so `-exc` means `-e -x -c` etc.

Excellent Sci-Fi yarn, with nostalgic references. I particularly liked the VAX-11 and LISP reference ("ideograms in a formal language full of parentheses")

Not my area, but isn't a lot of NVIDIA's edge over AMD precisely software? NVIDIA seem to employ a lot of software dev (for a hardware company) & made CUDA into the de facto standard for much ML work. Do you know if AMD are closing that gap?

I've used Slickgrid (open source, https://slickgrid.net/) with some success.

Does anyone know if Cahit's Spiral Chains proof (<https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0408247>) was found to have issues? It is much more elegant, as it avoids the exhaustive computer case verification...

I believe the parent was referring to line from the article which said "...square that gets partitioned into rectangles of equal area" - i.e. area of yellow, green, pink and orange is the same, so the area of the big rectangle containing all those four colours must be 4 times the height of orange rectangle (since their widths are the same).

So another Banks' novel - "Look to Windward" - title came from this poem

Slightly odd that they explicitly say:

  these should include the lang attribute to identify the language

Bolsheviks are not a great example of a success story to bring up in support of your argument...

Similar story: large chunk of my PhD at Bath in early 1990s involved porting Helios (which was developed on/for Transputers) to Intel i860. Fun times...

This thread talks about their implementation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10197197

Domain/OS on Apollo DN3500 software emulator (a little fiddly to set up): http://mess.redump.net/howto/apollo

Because for accounting the numbers easily fit in the supported range; even the US National Debt (https://www.usdebtclock.org/)...