“A Clockwork Orange” as “Old English” is an amusing anecdote, but it might be worth noting that the novel is written in deliberately nonstandard English mixing in Russian words, so it might be nontrivial to read for people lacking interpolation skills.
In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:
> There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
> many of them don't look like word definitions ("a sharp pain in the back”)
I had to look up the English word (lumbago), but German has the colorful “Hexenschuss” (witch shot). I suspect most people above a certain age can relate to there being a word for this in most languages.
Yes, I experienced this a number of times in my life.
Growing up in a small Swiss village I wasn’t born in, I had to learn that you basically greeted everybody you passed in the road, under the assumption that you knew them or were supposed to know them (more conversations were not needed).
Moving to a large Swiss village, I had to learn that saying hi to random strangers was considered weird at best.
First time I visited Southern California, I was very uncomfortable with strangers striking up random conversations. Later in the trip in San Franciso, I felt that the slightly toned down form of this habit was more comfortable for me.
Moving back to Switzerland after having lived in CA for a few years, I had to relearn old habits.
Vinyl has the benefit that you can largely assume that it will NOT be listened to at all, cf. the studies showing that half of all vinyl buyers don’t even own a turntable.
It also doesn't work on Raspberry Pi, though presumably it could easily be made to; it does replace the su binary, but the replacement is not executable.
When I started studying CS, the "industry" thought students should be taught COBOL, and maybe some PL/I and Fortran, because obviously that was what the market wanted.
You could do the same in reverse as well. Many of the features listed in the first paragraph existed before in other languages, though probably not all of them in a single language. In fact, I believe the design process (sensibly) favored best practices of existing languages rather than completely new and unproven mechanisms.
So there was considerable borrowing from PASCAL, CLU, MODULA(-2), CSP. It's possible that the elaborate system for specifying machine representations of numbers was truly novel, but I'm not sure how much of a success that was.
I would argue the opposite: Being describable in BNF is exactly the hallmark of sensible syntax in a language, and of a language easily amenable to recursive descent parsing. Wirth routinely published (E)BNF for the languages he designed.
Quarterly earnings will be released April 22. My impression is that in recent years, such rumors tended to cluster around earnings reports (which largely haven't been great the last 2 years or so), presumably as distractions.
The way I remember it is that I used at least Lycos and AltaVista before Google. In both cases, a major reason for switching was that the search itself got cluttered up with ads.
So Google's current trajectory does not bode well for them, as far as I'm concerned.
It's sort of ironic that at the time, there were many complaints that Apple made its devices thin at the expense of more important features. Now that M series MacBooks are thicker again, there are complaints that they are too thick.
Personally, I love synthesis that can be generated on the client machine, in real time. For some applications, like screen readers, this is a really important feature.
Of course, the big interest these days is in cloud based assistants, where synthesizing on server and piggybacking on the rest of the answer is quite reasonable.