5166cc9c39fa61

And not surprisingly that makes it less readable. It is a lot harder to have one-character names when you need to scroll across many pages to look up what they mean. So the more code you have, the longer code you need. As Eric Evans points out, naming things in computer code is difficult and important; wrong names can be misleading. This style avoids the problem by avoiding names.

I think a good introduction to this style of coding is the first "proof of concept" prototype interpreter for a small subset of J, also written by Whitney:

https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum

Once I realized it was K&R C, I thought it was pretty straightforward.

> Array languages are the most "obscure" of all paradigms I have looked into. Even concatenative ones have some few resources about how work.

Have you tried looking at APL books? There are dozens of books on APL you can find. There are journals and conference proceedings from ACM, IBM, Dyalog, and Vector UK. I started to get into APL more seriously last year and lack of resources is definitely not a problem in my experience, lack of time to read them all is. Also, it's more about thinking of algorithms in terms of matrix and array operations. A lot of the techniques and algorithms can be easily adapted from Matlab.

> If the city was willing to sell at cost (seriously, morphine and oxy isn't expensive to make at all), it would also destroy that economy, and potentially free some back in the hands of the people.

There is a proposal for heroin buyers clubs in British Columbia that has a lot of support: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/heroin-buyer...

Legalization not only cuts down crime (from both drug dealers and drug addicts), it prevents overdose deaths and reduces occurrences of medical emergencies and hospitalizations. The city can also collect taxes on the drugs.

I would take elisp over TypeScript any day. The tooling around TypeScript is hot garbage, debugging async code is a huge time waster, and things that are trivial with dynamic binding turn into major undertakings because of the module system. Also the verbosity and reams of boilerplate.

> Maybe it's the display, since I still only have the old 1600x panel.

It is most likely due to poor quality batteries. The "cells" in a 9-cell battery are 18650 batteries, which vary in capacity from 3400mAh at the high end, to counterfeit ones that are labelled to have 1200mAh capacity, but in reality have only a fraction of that. Lithium-ion batteries also have a limited shelf life, so even good quality aftermarket batteries will have a fraction of the rated capacity if they have been sitting in a warehouse for years.

> 16:9 for a work machine is a bad choice, and the resolution is horrible.

I found a way to turn 16:9 into an advantage: if you go for 70-character columns, you can get a 3-column display in a tiling WM or Emacs if your resolution is 1280 or more pixels horizontally (there are 5-pixel wide fonts out there, but none of them are very legible).

> If you haven't touched an NMB Thinkpad keyboard, you haven't actually used a proper Thinkpad.

All these years as a Thinkpad user, and I had no idea of NMB vs ALPS vs Chicony. I thought the variation in the keyboard feel in the machines I own and have used was due to wear alone. Thank you for opening up an entirely new horizon of Thinkpad snobbery.

> I don't think I've ever seen a laptop without one, and I used laptops back in the early/mid 90's.

Were you using PowerBooks? Touchpads were unusual in laptops until about 2000, when things started going downhill. All of the 1990s laptops I used that I can remember (IBM, Toshiba, Compaq) had superior pointing devices: trackpoint or trackballs.

If you are wondering "why drop support for the 386?," the diff for the removal of 386 support from the Linux kernel is a good read:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

tl;dr atomic instructions XADD and CMPXCHG, and serious bugs in many 386 CPUs. Also BSWAP was added in the 486 and speeds some things up a lot.

> Many German cities are so overcrowded that you need to network like in socialism to get what you want, as there are things that money can't buy (or at least only a lot more money can buy).

Similar situation in New York City for the past decade: https://www.thedailybeast.com/stuck-in-new-york-city-private...

> Except the Wolfram Language provides access to vast information about the world.

Which is mostly pulled in from public data sources, such as the CIA World Factbook, US census and economic data, US Geological Survey data, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, etc. Knowledge Graph was based on Freebase, which in 2016 transferred its database to the Wikidata project (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page). So once again, instead of throwing more undeserved money at Wolfram for appropriating other people's work, the better alternative is to work on integrations of Wikidata into Common Lisp, SciPy, Org mode, etc. and contribute to Wikidata itself.

> The products you mention are all good examples of niche products for techies.

The blind person that told me about how much better Gopher was than the modern web for blind people was not a techie, and I don't think it is moral to treat disabilities as just a "niche."

Rather than throwing even more money at Wolfram, it would be even better to put up a fund (maybe a crowdsourced campaign) to buy the rights to Macsyma and PDEase to release them under the GPL.

Those are some really good examples of the opposite of what you intended to say.

> * Wonky unwieldy hypertext systems instead of the WWW

Which ones? Gopher wasn't hypertext, but it is still going and still a good idea. A conversion to Gopher would be a huge usability and accessibility upgrade for many current websites.

> * The Nomad instead of the iPod

iTunes is garbage. iPods sucked until (certain models) had Rockbox ported to them.

> * The Blackberry instead of the iPhone

How about the Nokia n900 instead?

> * GNU Hurd instead of Linux

I'm "stuck" with BSD. Send help?

Ambitious projects are cool and should be encouraged. Being an ignoramus about existing developments (not saying that that is what the people behind Matrix are doing) and getting distracted by anything that claims novelty should not be. Hoare had a great bon mot about this: "Here is a language [Algol 60] so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors."