As someone living right in recluse territory, I'm constantly terrified when going into a closet to get clothes...etc, even though I see black widows all the time. Any time you're at the gas pump or in your garage, look around and you can probably find one.
As far as the smartphone angle you mentioned, it makes for a decent analogy, but isn't entirely relevant unless I'm being too specific.
Computational power was never the problem getting to the moon. The analog computers were basically some op-amp circuits. I think they had a differentiator and an integrator. You don't need 4 modern cores running on Android or anything. In fact, simple is probably best and safest.
Overall, I'm just being nitpicky and fully agree with the rest in that space currently isn't worth the economic cost.
In Arkansas, our roads are nothing but potholes. As soon as they are patched it rains (or as we say in the South, torrential downpours) and the entire road is a pothole again. Very annoying. It's always wet here and humid, btw. At least not as humid as Louisiana though.
I'd say def not rare, but it never feels very common to me either relative to the posts on similar technologies like Lisp, Prolog...etc. So I can understand the parent comments view.
Yayy! More mentioning of ST (and Pharo) on HN. I'm just a beginner, but am slowly learning. So far the IDE is the only one I really like as it is one with the language rather than an entirely separate entity.
My grandmother is a ham that is heavily involved in her ham club. Everyone was older, but polite. Of course they have different political views, but they're not a bunch of creeps, although there are some weird hams for sure. I knew one guy in college that was getting a license so the government couldn't listen to him like they could for his phone. I was like "what...you do realize you're basically broadcasting out to the whole city".
It makes it easy to learn the hardware because it has a simple processor and makes it dirt simple to access. Windows on the other hand runs on modern chips and it isn't easy to run assembly without 3rd party software and graphics is also not something a child can easily handle. I suppose a good emulator would be similar, but emulation is a little bit of a lie :)
I find Fortran pretty pleasant for scientific work (what it was designed for) and take pleasure in knowing it hasn't changed a whole lot over the years F70, F90...etc.
It's not just easier to read for Julia programmers. Any pythonista can mostly read Julia without significant issue. They're both high level and syntactically similar enough. I know Python is a lot more OO, but when you're just writing a short script it looks a lot like Julia if Julia didn't need you to specify types.
There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with Mathematica and it is available for free on Pi, but some people will take offense at closed source proprietary software and for good reason. Some things in the Wolfram language are so amazing though. Stephen Wolfram has commented on how bad highschool CS education is. Learning hello world and some Java or JS is great, but being able to seamlessly use the thousands of functions in Mathematica is really neat. For example, things like Conway's Game of Life, other automata, sound processing, image processing, neural networks...etc are all built in and composable primitives. The big downside is you're really just learning their tech stack and you often use a declarative approach, so they may miss out on imperative concepts (for loops are a code smell in wolfram language).
Agreed. I'm a python beast, but really struggled with Assembly language in school. I'd have been better off with a ZXSpectrum earlier in life so I could've learned hardware. IMO high level languages (as insanely useful as they are) are similar to writing spells like a wizard and using assembly or even basic when you know all the registers...etc is more like a real science. Both are valuable, but I really wish I knew more about hardware.
ZXSpectrum Next is exactly this. An old ZXSpectrum computer that is newly made with more RAM and in a much better package. Complete with lots of games you can get. I think they're always out though....not sure if we'll ever see more :(
What does Factor have to do with my question? Yes it's a concatenative language that is still maintained although Slava left. I'm guessing it wouldn't make a great example if you're suggesting going through source.