herodotus

First edition of Copernicus has a starting bid of $600,000.

It does. Parenthesis are allowed - they are syntax for lists so that a * (b + c) will compute the contents of the list before sending the resulting object to a*. The inspiration is the idea of Currying in Lambda Calculus, although it requires postfix notation. Now you have me thinking about whether I could alaso make parenthesis and commas into objects. So (1+2) for example for do this: ( is sent the object 1. That yields the object (1 That is, an object that is not ready to be sent on. The "(" bounded object would only be released when it received a ")". Thanks for the thought!

I once invented a programming language where EVERYTHING was an object. No message keywords. 1 is an object. + is an object. You can send an object to another object - you get back an object. Example 1+ is an object. Its is the result of sending + to 1. If you send 1+ the object 1, you get 2. If you send 1+ the object + you get a run-time type error. You can also go left to right. +1 is an object. If you send +1 to 2, you get 3. It gets nice when you add list objects. (1,2,3,4,5)+1 => (1+,2+,3+,4+,5+) 1 => (2,3,4,5,6). And so on.

Sorry - it was so long ago I really do not remember that particular feature.

Good. One of the things I loved about my years working at Apple is that everyone I had dealings with really cared about the user experience.

Yes. When I was working at Apple, I was developing some animation stuff for Keynote. I came in to work one day, and my build was broken completely. Turned out that Roger Rosner had demonstrated this animation feature to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs hated it, and before then end of the evening the code had been stripped from the Keynote build.

I would love to see good animations of a differential gear and a detente escapement.

My most interesting interview experience, but as interviewer not interviewee, was when we interviewed someone by phone and could hear a friend of the candidate whispering answers to him. He was not offered a job. We should have offered it to the mystery voice person.

I am seeing way to many "Performing security verification This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot." from Cloudfare these days. It strikes me that, if it has verified my client once, it should hold off at least for a day or so before putting me through that hoop again. How does Bunny DNS deal with bot protection?

For those who need some context: In 1983 David Warren published a paper describing an abstract machine that could be used as the target of a Prolog compiler. This machine became the basis of most Prolog compilers - it is much faster than interpreters. His paper was not easy to understand. Hasan Air-Kaci's book was a brilliant exposition of Warren's work, and was a must-read for anyone serious about working on Prolog interpreters or compilers.

Knuth's Optimization Principle: The computer scientist Rod Burstall had a pithy way of saying this: "Efficiency is the enemy of clarity"

I don't know what country your ancestors came from, but I assume you are not held responsible for any horrible thing that government does.

I am curious. If it is on the far side, where does the light come from for the photos? Other stars?

And lying: "Please listen carefully as our menu items have changed". Only once did I get what everyone should use instead: "Please listen carefully to be sure you make the right selection". (Lying is also normalized by "I have read and agree to ....". Maybe better would be: "By clicking this box, you are agreeing to our needlessly lengthy terms, whether or not you have read them."

Sumerian and Akkadian are two different languages. This tablet is written in Akkadian and is dated in the Akkadian era. The authors claim is that the tablet is a [translated] copy of a much (much) older Sumerian tablet. Apparently the author's theory is not taken seriously by assyriologists or ancient science historians.

And here in Canada I worry that the same irrational forces that elected Trump twice and voted for Brexit will lead to new referendums on the break up of Canada in Quebec and in Alberta, leading to the end of this country.

Thanks ....

This is an ambitious project. Might I respectfully suggest that you use your favourite AI (or an English-speaking friend) to fix your many grammatical errors and typos? For example "Note: ALL the syntax highlighting of the Rust code is custom and create by me! If you see and bug, please write in the comments or submit an issue." should be "Note: ALL the syntax highlighting of the Rust code is custom and was created by me! If you see a bug, please leave a comment or submit an issue." Also, Rust, not rust. And many more.

It is impossible to verify anything in this article. For example "In recent internal discussions and public remarks". Where are these public remarks? How did this author get access to internal discussions? I rate this article as clickbait nonsense.

What bugs me is that it is impossible to buy a TV these days that is not "smart". (Of course I know I can just not connect it to the internet, and I don't, but I wish there was a company in the TV market which would make privacy a selling point).

Thanks for doing this. I am well retired now (from Apple) - so too late for me, but after sampling a few chapters I think every fresh software engineer should read your book!

Amazing - but iPhone screen is too small. Works on my iPad.

In the early 1990's, during my days as a Comp. Sci. prof, I was so excited about the emergence of the internet. When I saw the Mosaic browser (a precursor to Netscape and later Firefox) I knew the world had changed for the better. Now I have such mixed feelings. Magazines (like the Farmers Almanac) either go online completely or just disappear. They just cannot compete for advertising dollars with Google. And small family run local retail stores, offering not just goods, but a social hub for people are shutting their doors because how can they compete with the convenience of Amazon. Much has been gained from the internet, and much has been lost.

When I was in second or third year of computer science in 1971 or '72, we (of course) learned IBM 360 assembler, but we also had to design a simple binary adder using AND OR and XOR gates. All on paper - no need for any soldering or electronics, which I regret. I cannot remember how many bits of input - probably 4 but may have been 6. But I did do quite a bit of asm programming, including a routine for calculating square roots using Chebyschev polynomials and newtons algorithm.

Ahem. Actually what I am most proud of is that I made pinch to zoom keep characters focussed during zooming. At that time, Safari let things get blurry until the user stopped zooming and then it snapped to focus. That is what I was supposed to do, but I decided to use mipmaps instead.