While I doubt I'll do any major development in it, I'll definitely have a play with it, just to revisit old memories and remind myself of its many innovations.

For people who aren't familiar with the language, pretty much all modern languages are descended from Algol 60 or Algol 68. C descends from Algol 60, so pretty much every popular modern language derives from Algol in some way [1].

[1] https://ballingt.com/assets/prog_lang_poster.png

Not if you step on them with bare feet - those things are worse than LEGO. They could punch through a horse's hoof.

The VAX was a 32-bit CPU with a two stage pipeline which introduced modern demand paged virtual memory. It was also the dominant platform for C and Unix by the time the Bellmac-32 was released.

The Bellmac-32 was a 32-bit CPU with a two stage pipeline and demand paged virtual memory very like the VAX's, which ran C and Unix. It's no mystery where it was getting a lot of its inspiration. I think the article makes it sound like these features were more original than they were.

Where the Bellmac-32 was impressive is in their success in implementing the latest features in CMOS, when the VAX was languishing in the supermini world of discrete logic. Ultimately the Bellmax-32 was a step in the right direction, and the VAX line ended up adopting LSI too slowly and became obsolete.

Here's another vision of the future - gradually everyone's cars become self-driving, and now cars are more accessible to a wider range of people. 30% of the population currently can't drive due to age or disability, but if cars drive themselves the elderly, disabled, and even children can now own and operate vehicles. And now you have 30% more cars on an already congested road system. That should be enough to make traffic jams the norm everywhere.

But in case that wasn't bad enough, consider this - now people can do other things while they travel, because they don't have to be driving. So, in turn, they can live further and further away from their workplaces in cheaper, larger houses and do more of their work on the go. And while they do this they're spending more time on the roads, and - you guessed it - causing more congestion.

And because parking will always be expensive and hard to find in busy city centers, people will set their cars to loiter while they visit, rather than parking. Just going round and round while their owners shop. Causing - you guessed it - even more congestion.

TL;DR - the most likely result of autonomous vehicles is out of control congestion.

Reading further down the page it says you have to compile the python code using CPython, then generate binary code for its custom ISA. That's neat, but it doesn't "execute python directly" - it runs compiled binaries just like any other CPU. You'd use the same process to compile for x86, for example. It certainly doesn't "take regular python code and run it in silicon" as claimed.

A more realistic claim would be "A processor with a custom architecture designed to support python".

Then 30 years on Oculus was founded and everyone who'd never used one of the old VR systems was super excited. To be fair, the technology was a step better - much cheaper and more accessible, low motion input latencies, better resolutions. But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough and it seems that the hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either.

I can't wait for round 3 in 2040 or so.

Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car - in terms of their energy costs per mile, including energy storage. Using the above numbers the EV comes out to around $0.07 per mile including the lifetime costs of the battery, and the ICE comes out to around $0.125 per mile.

In short - his numbers are completely wrong and when calculated correctly prove the opposite of what he's trying to say.

I think the ultimate goal of making a programming language is to cause the least friction for a programmer trying to get real work done, and in my experience Go's great from that point of view. Language bells and whistles may be exciting, but often don't pay their way in terms of real world productivity, IMHO.

There's plenty of RISC-V hardware around, and anyone can buy it. eg. [1]

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/RISC-V_hardware_list