You're generally correct, but in this particular instance it does actually make sense to call it the dark side. Dark, as in "quiet" from RF interference. Just like some areas on Earth, near radio observatories, are declared "dark" (i.e. everyone tries to avoid using high RF emitting stuff in these regions, even comms satellites avoid it).
I tried to use Vim once, and found that none of the Emacs keybindings worked there. Seriously, learning x86 assembly language is easier than trying to grasp that INSANELY bad keyboard layout.
I would never buy a kit that required soldering, because I'm terrible at it. But I like putting things together. I've assembled a couple of DIY keyboards, and I bought a Framework 12 laptop. It doesn't take too long (Framework estimated 15 minutes, but it was more like 45, because I am slow and methodical), and I like knowing what's inside it. The transition from “box of components” to “working system” always thrills me. And, though the repairability of a trackball is not a big issue, it's nice to know that what you put together can be taken apart, for example, to replace an SSD in a laptop.
er, no, it was licensed, but available to educational institutions. I remember having to send Bell Labs our university calendar when i wanted to get a copy of LSI-11 Unix circa 1976. What is true is that Ken Thompson visited a number of places over the years, and maybe from time to time he forgot to pick up his Unix install tapes when he left.
Bell Labs/AT&T claimed exclusive ownership of Unix, and the exclusive right to license it, right up to the BSD case in the early 1990s, where it was determined that AT&T had used Berkeley code, and vice versa, to the point where copyright notices were essentially fiction. Berkeley Software Design had to remove a small number of files from their distribution, and then System V and BSD could go their own separate ways.
There are 2 more that I would add, both books I read as an undergraduate nearly 60 years ago. First, Marvin Minsky's Computation: Finite And Infinite Machines (published 60 years ago). Not the latest word in automata theory, but as a first year student, I could read it and understand the issues he was addressing. Second, reading the First Edition of v.1 of The Art of Computer Programming (which of course Knuth has revised several times) was what convinced me that there was a difference between computer programming and computer science. Needless to say, there was much in TAOCP that I didn't understand, but showing me the relationship between computer programming, computer science, and mathematics really did change my life.
There are a number of image-based Scheme systems. Chibi Scheme and Chez Scheme come to mind. In both, you can save an image and reload it at a later time, though for very good reasons, most people start each session with a fresh copy of the default image.
SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someone learning Scheme. (But SICP will turn some of the people on to CS as a discipline.)
Until the threat of anti-trust against IBM, and the latter's decision to “unbundle” its software from its hardware, in 1969. There had been proprietary software before that, but very little horizontal software (OSs, development tools, etc.) Autoflow's flowchart generator was a rare example of this.
I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way multiple inheritance in C++ game code). If I were running a Lisp-based project, there would be project standards (like no exported macros without signoff, and a list of standard library dependencies), documentation requirements, and code review.
The fact that Lisp is the “programmable programming language” doesn't mean that every engineer should be inventing weird versions of while loops. What it does mean is that a skilled Lisp programmer can build a domain-specific language that substantially helps in development.
One good example of this is the Crash Bandicoot games, along with the same studio's Jax and Daxter, which were built with dialects of Lisp (yes, they had to compile the code, and take care with storage allocation, just like any other game code). Cisco hired Kent Dybvig, principal author of the Chez Scheme system, and open-sourced that software; I have no clue what they use it for, to be honest, but I assume that they had some reason for doing this. Companies using various Lisp languages have been documented in areas from fintech to quantum computing.
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