obliquely

from the article: "Most plug-in hybrids on the road today are essentially gasoline vehicles with a battery shoehorned in to provide a small amount of all-electric range. EREVs [Extended Ranged Electric Vehicles] flip the concept. They are designed first as electric vehicles, and the engine solely acts as a generator for the battery, with no mechanical connection to the wheels."

Related: the drum sound of Bowie’s Low is similar and similarity iconic/influential. It was created in a different way and predates the Gabriel record, being recorded in 1976. Plenty of geeky details at: https://youtu.be/MbQZx892PHE?si=rs3EhTUAGBkp3eYU

Minor nitpick: inline assembly had been invented already. Indeed it had been implemented and shipped for the Acorn Atom in 1980. The Atom packed a quirky but effective BASIC with an inline 6502 assembler into its 8Kb ROM. And a BASIC with rather more features, and an inline assembler, was shipped with the BBC Micro, slightly ahead of the ZX Spectrum launch. Folks on the Cambridge scene had the chops to do better versions of BASIC, they just didn't make it into any Sinclair products until the QL. (And, a later Sinclair product, the Z88, of course, shipped with the Z80 version of BBC Basic a few years later, this time with an inline Z80 assembler.)

In the "first look video" Ash Hewson (Affinity CEO) says "“we’ve also got full scripting capability coming very, very soon” (at 21:33). What's said in the video is that this - and some other developments - will be part of "free" and not dependent on subscription. https://youtu.be/UP_TBaKODlw?si=lJkRZ6l8ekQRF43R&t=1293

You could just as plausibly say that Swift is a high-ish-level functional-ish language with a modern syntax. Whereas C blows up at runtime, Swift nags-and-whines at compile time - in that way it's very unlike C. All that said "in the C family" is highly ambiguous at best...

It's not a great article, but the main line of objection in comments here seems to be "This won't happen, because AI won't do the job well and certainly not better than humans." Sadly, we already know that that's not a reason for things not happening.

For example, robot staffed called centres are worse in almost every way than human staffed ones. And yet they are widely deployed in certain use cases, e.g. utility companies. And, more broadly, even when humans are involved in some chain of interaction between person and organisation, they sometimes have limited options because the computerised system imposed on them is not to designed to empower them to make on-the-hoof discretionary decisions.

Organisations chose to use automated systems of various kinds, because they think it saves money and because the reduction in service is not so appalling that that they lose customers. Or, of course, because they are an essential service, and people need to use them anyway.

We might think that competition would mean that organisations who didn't do this would do better, but often that's not how it actually works. Having an appalling system for escalating complaints is terrible for the relatively small number of people who need to make complaints. But organisations are often not optimising for good handling of edge cases even if, in some better world, we would like them to be.

(Or, indeed, never mind what we would like, organisations might not optimise for edges cases even if it might be rational for them to in the sense that it might actually save them money - edges cases can be expensive - or win them reputation - handling edges cases well is good "marketing" etc.)

Hypercard was this and generated really rich "folk" artefacts. Filemaker (https://www.claris.com) is sort of this still. A modern example is Coda (https://coda.io) which is seeks to be spreadsheet like in terms of inviting folk (end users) to play and create while making database and scripting easy enough to discover and wrangle.

DOLT vs DO-IT: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Do_It.txt