Phiwise_

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward realpolitik.

But why have fun with your kids when you could spread the good word of open source instead?

Just subtracted off one too many fives!

1992 was 7 years before 2004, which was 20 years before today.

Smalltalk is a partially-functional language (first-class functions in 1976, inspired by lisp) and also got static typing extensions many years ago.

It's because the IBM PC was released in 1981, and over the next several years, as prices came down, steadily overran pretty much every other competing platform and took all the variety out of the market from a historical perspective. If you're interested in 40-year-old computers you could have a collection with a z80 machine, a 68k, a 6502, a tms9918a, or an 8088, and that's just variety in CPU architecture, and just some of the popular ones. Everything else was the wild west, too. Go backward too many years from there, though and the home and small business computer manufacturing industry just isn't as big, and specimens become an order of magnitude harder to find that aren't just glorified calculators. You have to put up a lot of cash comparatively to get the fun part of the hobby of owning and using them yourself over just reading about them, which you can do for any machine in any era, plus they're harder to service. If you're collecting 20 years later, though, things had gotten so much more standardized and developed that it feels almost like a different hobby. Most all of what you'll buy will be some variant of the HP versus Emachines dichotony: either an expensive IBM PC Compatible using all the common standards, with a high-tier x86 that mostly does what they all do but faster, and maybe an add-in specialty card, or a cheap IBM PC Compatible with some of the common standards, some things shaved off for cost, a low-tier x86 processor that's just more frustrating than your fast one, and a motherboard covered in cheap components that you have to solder in replacements for before it even works again.

I've painted a bit of a skewed picture here, but not by much. You can still collect later computers, and people do, but it's understandable that most people are drawn to the "cambrian explosion" of the whole line of history, no? Variety is the spice of life, and plenty its staple food to be spiced.

"I'm clear of all accusations" lmao dude we're not in court

This game of repeating my argument back to me but worse has gotten old.

Sorry I wasn't trying to argue that they're raising money specifically to line their own pockets. Maybe they want to branch out to other nonprofit internet causes, maybe they've become convinced they need a rainy day fund for the long term of their operation, maybe they're using this case as a lead-in to fubd lobbying and activism, etc. I'm just confident that, whatever the reason is, they know what they're doing to get there. They're not ignorant about the law of the one subject they've been dealing with for decades, and my argument is it's scummy to take your donating users hostage like a for-profit might regardless of why you do it, because nonprofits are given numerous legs up on the risk of competition specifically on the argument they wouldn't behave like this. You could probably even dig up some statements from IA over the years to this effect; they've certainly associated officially with peiple who said so all the time. If the field were even they would at least be taxed on whatever they're collecting money for like for-profits are, and that money could pay for the court process of batting down their inevitable bunk. Instead, you and I have to fund it when we have the selfish gall to do things like work for our wages or exchange those wages for food, plus now we have to fuel the other side too if we want to save our crowdsourced abandonware repository from this hostage situation come partisan dirty war.

By analogy, programmers like LISP over other syntax for the same reason that creative children like LEGO over other toys. It's not that the pieces in the box are more beautiful than any other individual example of molded plastic, but because they are purpose-built to be the maximizing mold such that a box full of them gives more flexibility and potential than a box of any other shape you might choose. Lisp syntax is the way it is to create a human-machine interface with as much similarity between the two sides as possible, so the human approaches machine power when you write code, and the machine approaches human reasonability when you inspect running code.

For examples, McCarthy's original purpose was to demonstrate the effectiveness of a symbolic differentiation process he had dreamt up, so he devised the syntax and meta-circular evaluator of lisp to make it maximally obvious from the program text that the differentiation system was mathematically correct, while keeping it maximally obvious from the program model definition that it was computationally concrete. In response to new trends in the programming field, Lispers write mind-bending books like "Let over Lambda", "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol", or "Software Design for Flexibility" to show that, when your syntax and model is right, you can radically change how you solve problems not by rewriting your spec or switching languages but by just adding more lisp to the lisp you already have, which has the same simplicity as radically increasing the sculptures a child can make by just adding more lego to the lego they already have.

Lisps, on the other hand, tend to add features as just more convenient versions of things they can already do: Macrology for self-adapting code? Just lisp functions on lisp data structures corresponding to lisp functions. Actors for a concurrent execution model? Lisp functions as lisp data parameterized by higher-order lisp functions. Composable continuations for error handling? A lisp function exploring a lisp data structure of lisp data structures of lisp functions. It's turtles all the way down. Paul Graham points out that you can understand the social hype the presence or absence of a feature like operator overloading as a consequence of friction-ful syntaxes, while lispers care much less because replacing a function you don't prefer with one you do for your use case is straightforward in a friction-free syntax. When he decided to build a reddit clone for tech entrepreneurs he didn't need an outside data system just to get started, he only had to spin up a pool of threads for sessions to directly modify s-expression literals in memory, which he could save or modify by printing straight to disk and load by just reading the lisp syntax back into memory like all lisp code is, with no execution intermediary like languages such as the Pythons tend to have complicating things enough to make comparatively big services like a whole database for a private gossip forum worth the effort. The syntax doesn't make lisp first-order beautiful, it makes lisp the hacker's local maximum, which is second-order beautiful, and honestly isn't much harder to get into the habit of reading once you know it's worth it.

This is a stunning lack of self-awareness.

Do you not know what "non sequitur" translates to or something?