One highly intelligent and extremely accomplished individual, who tutored me in calculus over 60 years ago, declared his achievements to be due to “occasional lapses in stupidity”.
Back in the day, over a decade or so, I wrote a few megabytes of VAX Basic. The language, and the code I wrote, at the end of that period looke nothing like it did at the beginning. So yes, it’s quite likely that the Basics are substantially different.
Modula-2 – a blast from my past. Back in the ‘80s I used it to implement a prototype distributed OS (as designed by a team at JPL) on VAXen. Logitech (!) had a really nice VAX compiler back then. One of the most productive 6-month stretches of my career. Luon looks like an answer to my unspoken prayers. Thank you!
Back in 1963, I had the privilege of participating in a program the summer before my senior year of high school. This was at the research lab of GE in Schenectady. I was working (not very productively) on a project involving platinum catalyst of hydrocarbons – what eventually became catalytic converters. The kid who tutored me in calculus (and later won a MacArthur grant and founded his own think tank) worked on what was then called nuclear magnetic resonance or NMR. Now it’s the guts or MRI machines (they left off the “nuclear” for PR reasons. I wonder how many kids these days have the chance to do shit like that, and if there are any labs where long-term research like that is funded.
I tend to keyboard minimalism myself: doing as little typing as is required to produce the code. I.e.: lots of keyboard macros. Thus reducing the cognitive load of typing to a minimum.
The thing is, of course, that being richer, beyond a certain wealth, does not, in fact, make you better off – it may well make you worse off (people will hate you because of it, your security costs go way up, etc.).
All men want is a level playing field, a few steps higher than the level playing field women play on. (Which they had up until not very long ago, and still have to a large extent).
Reading this, I remembered that early in my childhood, we actually had a milkman delivering milk to our home a couple times a week. (In New Jersey, USA, in the 1950s)
60 years ago, I never got to debug my first assembly program, which had 1 syntax error and an unknown number of bugs, because NASA launched a weather satellite, data from which monopolized the 7090 which the high school enrichmment program was having programs run on. Still rankles a bit.
I worked at iii in the late ‘70s, and my desk was in the cubicle next to the movie group’s. I loved looking over the divider to look at the latest pictures from Westworld (Yul Brinner with a photogrammetry grid) or Tron, or a teapot. Fun stuff.