The funny thing to me is, knowing Joel, the interns and developers being interviewed where the few, the proud, who could solve fizzbuzz. Nowadays that's... quaint given the prevalence of leetcode style interiews.
I would guess this one, but I don't think any usernames carried over. Except maybe the one I can't recall right now (startup related to streaming video over .gif back in late 90s iirc).
He wrote a book with some others guys that was supposedly influential in governemnt during the cold war. My understanding the impetus behind "star wars" missile defense was was kind of a decoy to get the Soviet Union to spend themselves to death.
It is a security measure. Suppose you have a marketing site for a client. You'd like users to be able to fill out and submit a contact form. A host like neocities can display the html with the form to users, but neocites won't let you POST the form and do anything with the data. So, CORS allows your page on neocities to POST data to another domain (ie www.othersite.com). The javascript on the page would do something "event.prefentDefault()" to keep the user on the page, doing the form submission via ajax. Then the server at www.othersite.com can do stuff with the data.
There are third party services that provide form processing of this nature, and even complete database backends and user management APIs (I built one).
There are a lot of differences. A Wordpress sites html is generally rendered serverside, by php code with access to plugins and a database. Wordpress can do things like post forms, run surveys, you can pretty much implement any web app you care to with Wordpress and plugins. It's a very mature platform.
Neocities sites are static HTML, meaning once your files are uploaded,they don't change. Neocities doesn't do POST, there is no database backend or code running on the server.
Now in 2017, CORS allows client side apps to do just about anything traditional web apps have done, without page tranistions, given an appropriate backend. The difference is that html rendered by javascript on the client typically isn't indexed by search engines, while html served from a domain are. That's one significant difference, there are others.
I built a service specifically to be a CORS sql database and user management api backend for neocities last year. The example app was forum single page app. I pimped it here but it didn't get any traction. It was my "wouldn't it be cool if" from building geocities sites back in the day. I guess there are a lot of other avenues for learning to code nowadays.
It compiles a c subset to byte code, then executes in a virtual machine. I think generally an intepreter can refer to either a byte code interpreter (ie virtual machine) or an AST walking interpreter. I didn't see a way to embed c4 into a host language, so maybe not a scripting language?
IMO the real value of exhibits like this are boiling the problem (lexing, parsing, compiler, interpreting) down to their most basic parts. One could easily imagine this same language being implemented over 10's or 100's of class files in a more verbose language.