The Roc and Zig folks probably have actual numbers.

So while Lisp may not be purely functional, the culture hewed that way.

Also, using it as a schema doesn’t totally suck. There are others but proto is… fine.

I have lots of opinions, but don’t feel like spinning up to a full rant here :-)

It's also a great early example of the massive win you can get by replacing hardware with software (and "software" -- in the form of a state transition table encoded in a small ROM).

It's also one of the reasons there were so many fascinating and weird copy protections for Apple II software: since so much of the behavior was in software on the computer, it was malleable. (Since it uses the CPU for tight timing loops, the Apple II couldn't really do much else while using the disk.) The write-ups by 4am on IA are fun reading if you're into this kind of thing: https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am

There are some fun projects to record disks at the level of magnetic flux transitions. I'm mostly familiar with https://applesaucefdc.com by the amazing John Keoni Morris, which came with a new file format too, and some lovely UI software.

It was the first thing I coded entirely with Claude, and absolutely blew me away. (Mostly, it turns out other people already did all the hard parts -- the inspiration was running across a reddit post where someone said they wired together pyiodide and the Ace editor in a few hundred lines of javascript).

This was my first experience of "if you know what you're doing, LLMs can build things well and incredibly quickly". I think MVP took one evening, and then two more rewrites pushed it out to a week or so. (One after I realized fully offline was a worthwhile idea, the second after I realized the backend could be a dumb key/value store with only prefix iteration.)

As mentioned, it's local-first: everything should work perfectly offline after loading it once. Saving is limited to my kid’s school domain at the moment, but it’s super simple to host: just compile the Go binary and put it behind Caddy or something.

Code (which I literally have not read) is at https://github.com/zellyn/trifling

[Edit: p.s. try the avatar editor!]

In reality, the programming language tells you all kinds of subtle things: probabilities about the way the software will feel to use, how stable it’s likely to be, how fast, what the author is likely to focus on.

I found one of the best jobs of my life in 2015 by asking “who’s doing interesting things in Atlanta in Go?” Not because I was uncompromisingly settled on Go, but because in 2015, using Go (often) connoted a certain approach, a certain type of engineering, a certain constellation of values.

So please stop pretending the whole gestalt of programming languages and their communities don’t deeply affect the resulting software.

(I say this with no unkindness intended, mostly to all of hackernews)

I also ported it to JavaScript (linked from above page)