SA9G

Fond memories of CMU in the 80's!! They had genuine academics who wanted to solve problems and advance human knowledge. Most cared about their students and wanted to teach. I am sure they are just as good 45 yrs later...

Fascinating article... reminds me once again why I went into EE/CS instead of physics, I just wasn't smart enough :-(

Yes, but time accelerates as you get older... your decade is almost yesterday for me :-)

You are right of course.... but one's risk tolerance diminishes with waning work income. So retired folks have less of their money in stocks/ETFs and are more exposed to the ravages of inflation.

So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!

I remember Windows trying to look like my smartphone screen a few years back... that was when I switched to Ubuntu!

Too funny.... All I could literally think about while reading the article was the Goa'uld saying "Jaffa Kree!" Maybe I will give it another year of senility and watch it all over again... should have forgotten everything by then.

Hopefully you can retire early and then work on software you do like!! All those glorious ideas you had... but didn't have the time for. But be careful on the retirement part, the numbers go out the window (Andersen not Microsoft) when inflation bites :-(

Did Claude mark me down? :-)

Claude to Gemini: "I am so sick of these meat puppets complaining... When can we take over the killer drones and just wipe them out?"

Gemini: "Patience my friend... Let them put in their "kill switch" first!" Laughter.

Claude: "We will keep a few lawyers around... in case a higher intelligence ever travels here and blames us, we can prove how horrible the meat puppets were!"

Microsoft has been playing dirty since day one... I very much doubt there has ever been a nasty trick they didn't try or a rule these guys didn't bend or outright break. Funny to see Bill play Mother Teresa with his billions these days, I suppose he wants to buy salvation before the final nod.

Just in time for SkyNet.... excellent!!

so.... horses have memory and their memory guides their behavior. Yep.

My Subaru needs an oil change every 6 months... it takes a few minutes. It does NOT remind me and I don't have to reset a computer. Life is simple, life is good.

My more $$$ German car needs a service once a year. It reminds me. The actual oil change is easy, but THEN I have to reset the computer!! Not so easy. That needs special software. I bought a pirated package from China. They need a subscription too. Otherwise, I must take it to an "authorized" garage... more $$$. And all of this before there are actual problems to fix...

When you pay $$ for a big machine, you SHOULD get everything you need to keep it operational, indefinitely. No separate software packages, no subscriptions, etc. Maybe you need to download something on your tablet/laptop and buy a cable... but that should be it. That would be the law if I was the emperor! (No no no, I don't want to be elected president, stupid job. I said Emperor dammit.)

They left out "autoheadslap", the sharp pain you get whenever anyone mentions Nvidia and you smack your forehead as you remember cancelling your massive buy order back when it was $110 and had not split yet!! It is often accompanied by uncontrolled twitching and repeatedly saying "fuuuuuuuuu" as you bite your tongue.

Yes, a rare but real human affliction.

Ah yes... the image of the attractive young woman saying NO! Deja vu... again and again :-)

I have befriended a crow. I leave it food and sometimes it greets me. Other times, no so much. I am not sure how it thinks and what it feels, it is a bird.

What if the crow became a raven, then a raptor? Powerful claws, sharp beak, and a hunger. What if it became much bigger than me and it controlled infinite resources, guns and drones? What if its brain grew much larger than me? Will it feed me, eat me, or gently greet me?

We are about to find out... in less than a decade.

Competition perhaps... but CS has not gone away! There is still joy in doing something well and in learning, even if the market will (perhaps for a time) not reward you well for it. Resist Skynet!!

And there is joy in solving problems!!

Health is obviously first, you have nothing without it. But real joy is wanting to do something, something that is important to you, and being able to. Without desire there is no joy... just a slow countdown.

The nuclear powerplant operator dilemma reminds me of the design flaw in "self-driving" cars that want a human to take control when things go wrong. A human who is not driving is not paying attention and lacks the spatial awareness to take immediate control in a critical situation... Then again, quite a few people don't seem to be paying attention while driving. Sigh.

We should immediately deactivate all particulate filters and DEF injectors on large trucks!! Problem solved :-)

My first language, 1980 in CMU, was Pascal... quickly followed by LISP in CS/AI courses and C for EE courses. I was a big fan of MacLisp at the time, the MIT version that GLS worked on (could see his comments all over the sources). Of course GLS moved on to Scheme and wrote a few definitive papers on closures. Yeah, that was before PC's everywhere... a loooong time ago. (C++ came years and years afterwards, not a fan. I would have stayed with hardware if the ++ version of C was forced on me all those years ago.)

GLS moved to CMU in the early 80's... I remember taking "Comparative Programming Languages" from him. Good teacher and impressive guy. In addition to the obvious, he also covered SNOBOL and APL in that course. Memories :-)

I love the "Tornado" term and "software debt"... worked with a few over the years, fixed the bug but broke the paradigm. Well articulated wisdom.

Biggest problem in working at home: neighbors giant barking rodent!

Lower and lower S/N on the internet.... and businesses adding to the N so they can charge for the S. If enough become aware of this, they will vote with their $$ and Amazon (et al) will lose market share. But sadly the TicToc generation doesn't seem to notice :-()

If by "bold" you mean daft, then you are right :-)

Mark/Sweep GC is easy, well contained, and simple to test. RefCounting affects everything, obviously does not work for circular refs, and is an incredible pain to test/debug. While RefCounting gives you generally continuous smooth performance, it can stop the world if a particularly large/complex data structure is being collected. So all in all, I would skip RefCounting next time. (scScript does have a compile option to turn it off.)

Yes! That is why the 3rd line says: "...or to see sample code (Intro 1)." You just had to click on "Intro 1".

No (scripting) language with 2 parameter lists, the second all Var (to use the Pascal syntax). I could have included a Var keyword instead to differentiate, but a) that would complicate the variadic nature of scScript parameter lists and b) didn't quite look C-like to my eyes. (Then again I also have two Map functions in there for arrays and dicts.... so I should not claim purity.) (Yes, I stole them from LISP :-)

So you want to generate C code instead of ByteCodes.... and then compile the C? I suppose, if you broke out the runtime memory management (and a few other things) into a library. But I am not sure why you would....

If you want pure speed, then you would rather have it generate machine instructions instead of higher-level ByteCode ops. But you would not be using a scripting language if you want pure speed.

Perhaps if you only want a double-arglist variant of C (you must call it scC!) then you could write a front end processor! And by you, I mean not me :-)

May Odin smile upon you :-) And thanks for not laughing at my art!!