Programming Language for Old Timers, designed by David A. Moon. “[I]t does not have S-Expressions, does not have NIL, does not have conses, does not have atoms, and does not have a simple parenthesized Polish prefix syntax.”
International Lisp Conference 2009 – Day One, Day Two, Andy Wingo reports.
6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want. But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts.
— ILC, Day Two
The Art of the Propagator, by Alexey Radul and Gerald Jay Sussman. “We develop a programming model built on the idea that the basic computational elements are autonomous machines interconnected by shared cells through which they communicate.”
The Unknowable, by G. J. Chaitin.
I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say “Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?”
— Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation
WikiBirthday.org! The Wiki turns 14. And it’s still going well.
Nano Forth, a tiny dialect of the Forth programming language with only 11 instructions.