Growing up in Moore, Oklahoma in the 1960s and 1970s, my mother frequented the C.R. Anthony's store in the City of Moore Shopping Center. They used pneumatic tubes; the person at the check-out counter would put a receipt and money tendered into a tube and off it would go to somewhere, I figured some office in back, where they made change and sent the tube back. You could hear it rattle around a bit as it went on its way, and the way it would come back, zip out onto a open curved "landing strip" and slam into the stop was impressive.
I can only speak for myself, but Python struck me as much simpler to learn and understand than Perl. Also, my hatred for sigils burns with the heat of a million suns, going back to the $ suffix for string variables and functions in BASIC.
I'm curious. What is "accolade-free code"? It's referenced and highlighted as if it had a link but it doesn't, and Google appears to think it's a hapax legomenon (or whatever the equivalent is for phrases instead of words).
Sigh. Now I have to track down a copy of The Memluks' album Partida, so I can listen again to their classic "Joe's Thymus" (inspired, I'm sure, by the Readers' Digest "I am {Joe's, Jane's} [name of organ]" articles).
It's the difference between evaluating all the elements of a list, consing them, and returning it all at once and evaluating the elements one at a time (i.e. lazy evaluation). Saves memory and time and it gives you a chance to quit early.
The article mentions Steven Newman, author of Worldwalk. Neat guy. I met him in West Des Moines (or maybe Clive?) when he was promoting his book, and got an autographed copy, which I really hope I haven't lost over the years. It's well worth reading.
Without a desire for self-preservation? I hope not. If nothing else, if I spend $$$$ on a self-driving car, I want it to have some sense of self-preservation, so it won't obey random joker saying "drive yourself to my brother's chop shop" or "drive yourself off a cliff" just for the lolz. I might even want it to communicate with other self-driving cars so they can refuse to obey attempts to make large numbers of them block traffic to make it easier for bank robbers to escape, block first responders from a terrorist attack, or divert parades to where they have assassins waiting.
Asimov didn't consider that some humans are jerks when he did his robot stories.
The intent, as I understand it, is that "declaration should look like use", so that the base type is on the left. If you declare
int *foo;
then
*foo
is an int.
IMHO the existence of "cdecl" is evidence that it might not have been the right choice.
A week or so ago I was freaked out when some Google app nudged me with a link to email that said I needed to return a defective heatsink/fan by a certain date to avoid being charged for it. I looked, and found the email saying they'd gotten it; I had already sent it. If it's going to look for things like that, it should look for evidence that it's already been taken care of.
Not to mention "long" and "short". Also, yes, PL/I had a POINTER type, but just one. Algol 68 did what languages do now, i.e. specifies the type of thing the pointer points at (or the type of the thing the REF type references; speaking of Algol 68 vocabulary, "dereference" made it into common CS jargon).
Agreed about digital modulation, but I recall hearing multipath a lot more on FM, or perhaps it was just more obnoxious there. Traveling around large buildings or under a metal bridge would bring that familiar rapid flutter as the car moved through places where the reflections would reinforce and cancel. (You can drive through a lot more wavelengths per unit time for FM than AM.)