spindle

They estimate 14 million. (I would have said "over 10 million" to avoid spurious precision.) This makes me happy!

INTERCAL

This is an issue that should concern us all, since Finnish has a bright future: https://www.hagen-schmidt.de/suomi/worldlanguage.html

Can someone please advise me on how to donate money to help Ola? There's a relevant web site but it hasn't been updated for a long time - http://freeolabini.org/en/

Thank you!

This is lovely.

I'm having trouble working out how this differs from Factor, in which left bracket and quote are also not primitive.

Many congratulations on being formally proved right, Randall!

stderr

Fred Hoyle, "The Black Cloud"

and I wish someone cleverer than me would read Nick Harkaway's "Gnomon" and then explain it to me.

Not enough of them do, I agree, but some of the Modern Monetary Theory people do. E.g. Mark Blyth (some very entertaining talks on youtube), Stephanie Kelton. Also political economists do and always have, I believe. (IANAE, and in fact I'm not certain that Mark Blyth is an MMT person, but I thought I'd get the ball rolling.)

TCL is kinda similar to Rebol in some ways but in other ways it's the opposite of Rebol, because in TCL everything is a string (although it can ALSO have another type, thanks to clever shenanigans). (You probably knew this!)

Rockbox, which is replacement firmware that can run on many hardware players, can do this (and basically anything else).

https://www.rockbox.org/

I'm the same. Fortunately for me, I don't understand Japanese, and there's some great Japanese power metal - e.g. Marge Litch and Alhambra.

I've tried it with fish and found that, for me, it didn't add much and wasn't worth the switch, but it is arguably slightly better than fish's built-in history; so I'd say only bother if you particularly love learning new things of this type.

FWIW, nixpkgs packages angie

Whoa! Steel Bank CL actually is named after the metal (slightly indirectly - it's a reference to the fact that Carnegie Mellon University was founded partly on steel money).

Yes, but it costs something like $5,000, and you have to think of it in time.

> places won't hire you as a professor unless you have at least a Master's -- relevant work experience be damned

I believe this is largely to make sure that professors have plenty of experience of what it's like to be professored AT, at the relevant level. I've actually changed my own mind about whether that's a good argument or not (you can have fun guessing in which direction I've changed my mind), but anyway, having been a professor myself I'm pretty sure that's what they're thinking.

Does picolisp scratch that itch for you?

> you always inevitably need some kind of control flow that isn't stack based (for instance the pair "[" and "]")

FWIW (I don't think this answers your main complaint, but I do think it's fascinating), factor makes a lot of use of the pair "[" and "]" for control flow, but they're totally stack-based:

https://docs.factorcode.org/content/word-[,syntax.html

https://docs.factorcode.org/content/word-%5D%2Csyntax.html

Some other stack languages (not all of these concatenative languages use a single stack but most of them do):

https://concatenative.org/wiki/view/Concatenative%20language

Ah yes - thank you!

Can you say more about what's wrong about it? It seems plain right to me, in Newtonian physics, assuming only that light has a speed (which was not at all a crazy thing to think at that point), and historians of cosmology usually agree (source personal communication, so I could be wrong).

And he was important in the history of programming language theory, as an influence on Alan Kay (so Kay has said in talks - see YouTube passim).