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 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.