I'm not quite sure what the expectations of semi-privacy are here, but he's talked about it on the TC Discord, in the #development-branch-feedback channel (a search for 'unprofessional' should find it).
> Just one little story…I remember…The name Bob Hargraves [Robert F. “Bob” Hargraves, Jr. ʻ61] should come up somewhere in this business because he was the class I think of 1962, but he was a physics major at Dartmouth. He went on to get a Ph.D. in physics. He came back to Dartmouth as associate director of the computer center many years later. At any rate, he was one of those that worked on the LGP-30 that first summer and he devised a simple higher-level language program. By todayʼs standards, it was pretty crude, but it was FORTRAN-like, you know – sort of – in just six weeks.
> One student, without any prior background in computing, prepared a simple higher level language and language processor he called DART (Hargraves, 1959). Obviously influenced by FORTRAN, but wishing to avoid scanning general arithmetic expressions, he required parentheses around all binary operators and their operands. Hardly earth-shaking, but one conclusion was inescapable: a good undergraduate student could achieve what at that time was a professional-level accomplishment, namely, the design and writing of a compiler. This observation was not overlooked.
But at the same time Edgar T. Irons https://dl.acm.org/profile/81100268091/ is in town working on ALGOL syntax, and when Kemeny and Kurtz grab the wheel back they steer language development at Dartmouth towards more syntax (Kurtz assigns four undergraduates including Hargraves to implement ALGOL 58, resulting in ALGOL 30) and more lumpen, assembler-like semantics (Kemeny's DOPE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Oversimplified_Progr... in particular is a pseudo-assembler.) It was definitely DART that got Kurtz interested in implementing ALGOL on the LGP-30 in the first place though—see pp. 1-2 of the ALGOL 30 report ("ALGOL for the LGP-30"): https://people.csail.mit.edu/garland/publications/Reprints/1... : "It should be mentioned that our becoming involved in this project was a direct result of Hargraves’ having devised a complete language system (DART) during the summer of 1959."
But back to the point ... an interpreter (surely) for a high-level programming language relying on explicit parentheses, written in Dartmouth, in the summer of 1959? How much did Hargraves know about at that point about the IBM 704 implementation of LISP, finished by March 1959? To be sure, I doubt that DART was anything much like a full implementation of even LISP 1, but just the idea of doing a simple interpreter for FORTRAN-like nested mathematical expressions by requiring parentheses everywhere seems familiar. (McCarthy himself was still trying to do LISP as a FORTRAN extension as late as mid-1958 https://interlisp.org/history/bibliography/gi8mchkf .)
The story about cheating at Scrabble bears a fairly close resemblance to the episode in the Tintin comic Flight 714https://tintin.fandom.com/wiki/Flight_714 in which megarich industrialist Laszlo Carreidas cheats at Battleship while flying on his private jet https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/1i6cv... . If the Scrabble incident really did happen then it's uncomfortable how close it comes to a fictional detail deliberately written to make Carreidas look unscrupulous and a bit ridiculous.
IIRC pre-GFC FMIC has a generally good reputation among guitarists, and certainly in comparison to the preceding era of Fender, when it was owned by CBS.
Yes. As mentioned in https://github.com/maurymarkowitz/101-BASIC-Computer-Games the first, 1973 version targeting various minicomputer or large-system BASICs was entitled 101 BASIC Computer Games. The 1978 edition https://archive.org/details/basic-computer-games-microcomput... , claiming compatibility with "Microsoft BASIC Version 3.0 or higher" and having various other chainges, is named BASIC Computer Games Microcomputer Edition. (One difference is that the game names in the old 1973 version all obey the classic six-letters-at-most, all-caps filename convention familiar from (non-BASIC) titles like EMACS, SHRDLU, ADVENT, and SCHEME.)
It does starts to sound a bit like chortling about what a weird asshole Semmelweis is. ISTR to recall that US students of linguistics were slow to adopt the International Phonetic Alphabet because it North America it had become associated with elocutionists, and no proper academic linguist wanted to look like an elocutionist grubby.
He made snooker a (relatively) big sport by putting it on TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_Black because he needed something which would advertise the benefits of colour TV. The matches needed literal-not-metaphorical colour commentary for those on B&W sets, leading to the famous gaffe "Steve is going for the pink ball - and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3629569.stm . The theme music was the "Black and White Rag" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ri3utpSoRA .
He seems pretty unequivocal in the video: https://youtu.be/2HMPRXstSvQ . He even points out that it’s something which he’s claimed previously, ruling out the idea that it was some kind of spur-of-the-moment conclusion.
Additionally, a top-division European soccer team also typically plays something like 34 or 38 league games every season, and that doesn’t include things like domestic cups and European competition.
There's no clean separation between those things. The weakness and inadequacy of HTTP(S) and other protocols actively funnels people into the centralised services of big providers. It creates a world where storage is brittle and content is ephemeral, both directly due to its own failings and because it pushes people towards big providers who increasingly like things that way; and so on. Now human nature would be enough to tend to draw a lot of people towards lowest-common-denominator options, but a system which makes the alternatives frictionful and downright painful doesn't help either.
It's not a panacea or a magic fix for human nature, but one of the root causes of this is that the underlying architecture of the HTTP(S) Web is just inadequate. The world needs (technically viable and widely-used systems of) content-addressable storage: inherently achivable, mirrorable and recoverable, properly supporting intermittent connections, providing the stability which is the necessary (though not sufficient) base for building things like annotations and back-linking. That certainly can't force people not to choose the laziest and stupid options, but it really can't hurt if at least the underlying technology doesn't make doing anything but the laziest and stupidest thing inherently hard, esoteric and unrewarding. Instead we've created TV on the computer from the visionary Doug Engelbart manifesto Don't Create TV on the Computer. Worse, some people still seem to be trying to pat themselves on the back for the supposed pragmatism and savviness of those decisions, even while at the same time using their other hand to wave a fist at the Big Tech incumbents, content farms and grifters which they gave a structural advantage to. There aren't many things which should be a higher priority, and which are a bigger blocker of general improvement, than the continuing lack of widely adopted and widely adoptable content-addressable storage. Need to do something big about that, folks, and promptly.
1) more reliance on systems to track reputation across projects. I'm sure Microsoft, in the form of GitHub, will love to sell you a partial fix to the same problems it so enthusiastically helped to create. But there are the familiar problems of surveillance, identity theft, office politics, and system-gaming, and it doesn't on its own offer an onramp for new players.
2) in-person coding tests at the same Pearson test centres where people take most of their Cisco (and accounting, and ...) exams today. Not as expensive or inconvenient as you might think, but not the cheapest and easiest, and it certainly has the same concerns re. surveillance and identity theft
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