3chelon

I used to always put the full-stop (period) inside the quotes because I was brought up using that rule, but in modern writing it's considered more a matter of stylistic choice, because yes, sometimes it just looks, well, "wrong."

When I was a graduate dev I worked for a company whose primary product was a APL interpreter. So it was an interpreted language, but it may well be possible that it can be compiled or JIT these days. The interpreter was written in 68K assembler and was pretty fast I suppose, but then I'm not aware any benchmarks to compare it with, since APL is not like anything else (except, as someone pointed out, maybe MatLab).

Fair enough. It's a common mistake for people from an English background, too, but these days we have tools to eliminate typos like that.

Spelling.

Buy one now. After the Solar Flare Apocalypse, those of us rocking mechanical computers will be control the world!

I'd have thought a mask ROM would be incredibly easy to build. And the whole system would be nonvolatile anyway, so storage of mutable data would be straightforward.

Ultimately the code would compile down to binary; getting it into the machine is just like any other interface.

Yes, he's often described as an early Pop artist, but unlike the more famous Warhol & co., who used and embraced industrial processes, there's a definite "craftsy", home-made quality to Johns' work.

He used encaustic, which is a mixture of hot wax and oil paint, which lends the paintings a really unique texture. There's also often newsprint embedded in the paint, which adds another layer of texture.

Reproducing the American flag in this medium, and at scale, offers all sorts of questions. The red drips are maybe too symbolic, but the embedded newsprint gives a sense of history, and the whole handmade effect just adds to the ambiguity.

I once read some of his sketchbook notes, in which he'd written something along the lines of "try to hide what's going on from the viewer." So, he was being deliberately vague. And somehow it works, at least in his early works.

Thanks everyone for the corrections, obviously my understanding was flawed there!

I read some linked articles on this. It seems she did it simply to hide the evidence. Unbelievable, it's estimated she destroyed $1bn worth.

> it's more of a tiny ray tracer

It's a ray caster, where the rays are sent out from the camera to intersect the map. With ray tracers, the rays are sent out from the light source, IIRC.

Your point on OpenGL is valid, but that just removes all the learning from it. OpenGL does so much of the grunt work for you. This kind of old-school game engine is a great learning experience.

Wow, this reminds me of writing a very similar engine in the mid 90s after learning about ray-casting (and playing Doom of course). There was a very good book which covered the whole process called "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus", which I would have killed for at the time!

+1 for nostalgia!

This is news to me. I didn't realise Dawkins' theory had been so thoroughly refuted. What's the evidence for this?