> In the middle 70s it was COBOL, when COBOL'74 came out it became king of in-house programming for IBM

I thought IBM were still focused on APL in the 70s…

> "[Phoenix] repackages off-the-shelf semiconductors into devices that are virtually identical to the phased-out chips."

I'm slightly surprised that _virtually_ identical chips are allowed. I expected truly identical chips to be required…

I guess it depends on your definition of "allowed" vs "required". I believe that in commercial aerospace applications a device change (e.g. change of manufacturing process or process parameters, let alone different masks) would require the entire assembly to be recertified. That's why Boeing procures all spares for the product lifetime up front.

At some point, I'd assume that beggars can't be choosers. If the new chip works and does not introduce issues while still allowing the plane to continue to fly, I'm guessing they'll take the plane still flying.

Thanks for sharing that!

> AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere.

A bit facetious, but I'd expect Nvidia and the like providing the "AI equipment" to have a 10× share value at least…

As always, the real money in a gold rush goes to the people selling shovels.

How so?

I'm struggling to see how Roger's manipulation of the expressions without executing each line validates Dijkstra's point...

"This is easy to understand, see:"

5 lines of completely inscrutable symbols follow.

If you are expecting someone to learn a completely new notational language before you can communicate a basic algorithm, you have gone wrong somewhere.

You could also similarly write down merge sort in pure lambda calculus, which is interesting as an exercise, but not especially useful as working code, or as a way to explain how merge sort works.

For a smaller example, try the J Incunabulum[0] various explanations are available [1][2]

It's been discussed here before too.

[0] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum [1] https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... [2] https://tony-zorman.com/posts/j-incunabulum.html

> I'd argue a 50% hit to performance [...] is ... quite the regression

Indeed! Especially if said regression happens to impact anything trade/market related...

> daily drivers (ppc64le, Apple silicon)

How come you're running ppc64le as a daily driver?

Cameron is known to have a TALOS II machine

> the only relevant big-endian architecture is s390x

The adjacent POWER architecture is also still relevant - but as you say, they too can afford a support contract.

The adjacent POWER architecture seems to be used in ppc64le mode these days.

For Linux, yes. AIX and IBM i still run big.

The latter can definitely afford a support contract.

Likely because whilst it didn't work out commercially, the ideas smalltalk, prolog and other more esoteric languages (forth, apl) focus on are themselves very interesting.

In what world did Prolog not work out commercially? It's still used where it makes sense to do so.

oh, thanks! I didn't know that Prolog was still used commercially.