Or the (mostly forgotten) scripting language Pike (derived from the internal language of a MUD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(programming_language)

I was prepared for a debate on calling _exit() vs exit() vs no explicit exit in Pike. This app is pretty interesting, too though.

there is also the use of return from main(), in particular return -1; which doesn't exit.

i was debating whether i should post this discussion on the pike language discord, but now i will. you two made my day!

I don’t program regularly in Pike. I’ve played with some of the examples from various benchmark and language comparison sites for the most part, but given additional free time it’s a language I’d like to actually use sometimes.

I therefore wasn’t even aware of returning -1 from main() doing that. It’s an interesting thing. I’d like to read about that, but maybe not enough to join the language discord.

The TrueType fonts might not look like the screen fonts, but weirdly, I think it works for this use because it reminds me of "screenshots" in books and manuals from the era which weren't in general literal screenshots but were often typeset mockups of screens from the programs.

That's a good point. I didn't think of looking at them like that.

I agree that opening up opportunities for other futures is good, but I don't think Dune was a good example of that even if you like the story -- Dune simply avoided the issue by assuming the future would implausibly turn into the past and that technology would be rejected and medieval feudalism and centralized religious control would return. A better, more plausible, future would show, as is often the case, that the technology we think is so ground-breaking today, just is integrated into daily life and hardly thought about rather than disappearing (which basically never happens).

The "bad" is referring to the floppies, not the ad. The ad with the robots at dinner was about buying Maxwell floppies (which were considerably more expensive than no-name floppies) because otherwise the machines might "eat your files". A modern equivalent would be buying a SanDisk SD card over cheaper alternatives.

Maxell. No w.

Just a reminder for those who may be interested. WigglyPaint is implemented in Decker, an homage to Hypercard that runs on modern operating systems (both by John Earnest).

There's a great 1986 book "Designing and Programming Personal Expert Systems" by Feucht and Townsend that implements expert systems in Forth (and in the process, much of the capability of Prolog and Lisp).

Ha,you beat me to it! That book was my first thought when I saw this post. I have a copy sitting here on my bookshelf.

Just to expand on how bonkers this book is... they assume that everyone has easy access to a Forth implementation. So they teach you how to build a Lisp on top of it. Then they use the Lisp you just built to build a Prolog. Then, finally, they do what the topic of the book actually is: build a simple expert system on top of that Prolog.

I love it!

To be fair, in the 1980s thanks to the Forth Interest Group (FIG), free implementations of Forth existed for most platforms at a time when most programming languages were commercial products selling for $100 or more (in 1980s dollars). It's still pretty weird, but more understandable with that in mind.

It all depends on whether the paper fits the journal. Minor journals serve a useful service as a repository for minor results. And minor results are still worth publishing because they might provide a detail or technique later needed for a major result. The thing to be wary of is when you see a stunning result that should really be in _Nature_ or _Science_ in some minor journal. Why isn't it? Was it submitted there first and rejected? It would be nice if the history of a manuscript (and its peer review) stayed with a manuscript so you could see if the authors really corrected problems brought up by peer review or were just spamming journals with a flawed manuscript until they found one that published it.

Agree with all this. Once you've filtered / made decisions of quality based on the more substantive criteria, journal reputation can provide useful additional information / context. The case you mentioned is a good example.

And "if a clod be washed away by the C" which is a reference to John Donne's poem that introduced the phrases "No man is an island" and "for whom the bell tolls".

Yes, it certainly sells more than tires. It is basically a WalMart style discount store. And yes, it owns several other chains as well. But still, he says he's never been to Canada, and Canadian Tire and the other chains aren't operating in the US.

I think his point in general sticks, i.e. that businesses that he will never use, or have any common interest with, have got hold of his data.

I frequently get spam emails telling that the American tax service needs my details or my American medical insurance does. Sometimes I get ones telling me I've been shopping at some automobile store in the USA. I don't live in the USA, so neither of these are relevant to me, but it lets me know my email address is on some databases with a number of Americans.

One of the comments notes that Canadian Tire were "the only ones bothering to warn people that the company they use was compromised.

"Over here in the US I remember seeing something like that a number of years back. The card systems a bunch of retailers used was compromised and Target was the only one that bothered to tell everyone. And most people never knew if they used those other places they were compromised even if they didn't go to Target."

Up until last year they owned Helly Hansen. That would be my bet for the source of the data. Also own a bunch of product brands.

i'd say it was closer to Target, or tried to position itself as Target in Canada (since Target failed hard in CAN)

but it's mostly a home-and-hardware sort of store.

it also plays a foil to the real or perceived evilness of Walmart -- here is a less blatantly evil, Canadian alternative

When you get stuck, try random directions. That's what my robot vacuum does.

Not sure if you've played any RTS lately, but I'm fairly confident people would drop the game relatively fast if they started seeing their units taking off in random directions because they cannot find their way around a wall. But we could also be playing very different games :)