Absolutely love this little thing. Picked a couple up back when it was still a kickstarter and was super surprised at the build quality (shockingly heavy for its size) and how smooth everything went.
It's not a thing I use everyday but sooo much nicer than having to unplug and lug my proxmox server up from the meter closet anytime there's an issue.
The book "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity" has a large thread exploring this among both historical and contemporary mathematicians. How people who seem to have an almost supernatural gift for math are often just able to "see" more clearly. Not in equations or words, but images.
Also discussing the development of the ability/discipline and the difficulties in transcribing what you now intuitively know but need to describe to other mathematicians so they can understand (notation/equations).
It's a book that's stuck in my head since reading it and wondering how to apply some of this to other problem spaces.
I think you remember correctly! A lot of the BBS software would just show what the current user was doing as if it was their screen. I believe from there you could start a chat as the sysop and interact with them, else you kinda just watched.
The few times I ran one (was a sysop on a few, but remotely), I was always a little creeped out that I could see people typing messages, etc. Felt like invading their privacy.
Feels like Zig is starting to fill that role in some ways. Fewer sharp edges and a bit more safety than C, more modern approach, and even interops really well with C (even being possible to mix the two). Know a couple Rust devs that have said it seems to scratch that C itch while being more modern.
Of course it's still really nice to just have C itself being updated into something that's nicer to work with and easier to write safely, but Zig seems to be a decent other option.
Love this write up (and one's like it - there's so much good stuff in their archives). The stuff GloriousCow is doing with MartyPC is just so impressive.
Quite. I had a great Christmas break a couple years back going through all the missions. It has some edges to it but people have also implemented things like RISC-V in it so it's also quite complete. The game portion is enough for fun and exploration.
I got all the way to the final missions where you're writing your own assembly (that you created) to solve various programming puzzles. Only stopped because I got busy with something else and break was over. I def recommend it. Reminded me at the time of Code by Charles Petzold but applied.
(Last I checked the Author was rewriting much of it for performance reasons and to fix up a few gotchas that should be possible with circuits but aren't here - no idea if they still are but that was my understanding before)
That's the nice thing! You don't need to optimise the language and build a JIT as a smaller company, Shopify already did that for you. Just like Google did for Javascript, which lead to Javascript having any performance at all (which lead to node being a thing).
Also remember that Shopify didn't start out making billions. They started as a small side project on a far, far slower version of Ruby and Rails.
Same with GitHub, same with many others that are either still on Rails or started there.
You can optimise things later once you actually have customers, know the shape of your problem and where the actual pain points are/what needs to be scaled.
To me, I care a ton about performance (it's an area I work in), but there's not a lot of sense in sacrificing development agility for request speed on things that may not matter or be things people will pay for. Especially when you're small.
It's not a thing I use everyday but sooo much nicer than having to unplug and lug my proxmox server up from the meter closet anytime there's an issue.