In principle, you Rust could create something like std::num::NonZero and its corresponding sealed trait ZeroablePrimitive to mark that two bits are unused. But that doesn't exist yet as far as I know.

One of my suggestions was that they include hash tables, rather than rely on records (linked lists with named key). Got flamed as ignorant, and I've never emailed that mailing list again. A while later, they ended up adding hash tables to the language.

1. Goodwill and mindshare. If you're known as "the best" or "the most innovative", then you'll attract customers.

2. Talent acquisition. Smart people like working with smart people.

3. Becoming the standard. If your technology becomes widely adopted, and you've been using it the longest, then you're suddenly be the best placed in your industry to make use of the technology while everyone retools.

4. Deception. Sometimes you publish work that's "old" internally but is still state of the art. This provides your competition with a false sense of where your research actually is.

5. Freeride on others' work. Maybe experimenting with extending an idea is too expensive/risky to fund internally? Perhaps a wave of startups will try. Acquire one of them that actually makes it work.

6. Undercut the market leader. If your industry has a clear market leader, the others can use open source to cooperate to erode that leadership position.

C has always been classed as a high level language since its inception. That term's meaning has shifted though. When C was created, it wasn't assembly (middle) or directly writing CPU op codes in binary/hex (low level).

One thing that's not mentioned here, but something that I took away from Wolfram's obituary of Lenat (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/09/remembering-doug...) was that Lenat was very easily distracted ("Could we somehow usefully connect [Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language] to CYC? ... But when I was at SXSW the next year Doug had something else he wanted to show me. It was a math education game.").

My armchair diagnosis is untreated ADHD. He might have had had discussing the internals of CYC on his todo list since its first prototype, but the draft was never ready.

I must admit that while it's computationally quite wasteful, the web page does look quite neat.