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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing that this magazine issue is still (somewhat) relevant and interesting 43 years after its initial publication.

(I note that HN frequently has posts on Lisp as well as 8-bit systems.)

Other than HN, is there anything equivalent to BYTE in the modern era?

I do like magazines like Linux Format and RasPi, but they're focused on Linux and Raspberry Pi whereas BYTE seems to have covered all "small systems" from microcontrollers to multiuser systems (so both Linux and Raspberry Pi systems would be in scope, as would Arduino as well as Apple/Microsoft/Android/etc..) This issue also included a wide range of contributors from enthusiast developers to industry professionals to teachers and researchers.

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Actually, that might be evidence that there really hasn't been much progress in Systems/PL.

C++ seems to have made some progress in the last few decades. Python improves on BASIC in some ways. Java, JavaScript, Swift, and Rust have memory safety like Lisp, PL/I and Ada did.

But I tend to agree - the biggest advances seem to be in hardware: now you can run Unix on an internet-connected watch, voice recognition/translation/automatic transcription on a mobile phone, and real-time ray tracing on a game console.

Most of that progress is catching up with what we already had, as you kind of point out on your memory safety remark.

C++ improvements are related to the bare language itself, in regards to tooling, no one seemed to have cared to go beyond what something like C++ Builder has been doing for the last 30 years (more or less).

Python improves on BASIC, while still missing the compilation story from most BASICs.

Diving into Xerox PARC documentation about Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa XDE and Mesa/Cedar is quite revealing in what we already had 40 years ago, and how long it has taken to bring those ideas back into mainstream.

I continually find new features of programming languages.

Covid, my time in this house, and the people I was with, gave me a chance to explore Scheme and CLOS derivatives (GOOPS). It's a joy to work with, and it helps me understand Ruby and other later developments. The different hooks it gives you into your hierarchy really map out the space that's possible.

It would be nice to lose myself in BYTE. It was influential. But it feels wrong somehow? Maybe that's on me. Maybe someday I'll write a BYTE random-page generator service.

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