For a smaller example, try the J Incunabulum[0] various explanations are available [1][2]

It's been discussed here before too.

[0] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum [1] https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... [2] https://tony-zorman.com/posts/j-incunabulum.html

> I'd argue a 50% hit to performance [...] is ... quite the regression

Indeed! Especially if said regression happens to impact anything trade/market related...

> daily drivers (ppc64le, Apple silicon)

How come you're running ppc64le as a daily driver?

Cameron is known to have a TALOS II machine

> the only relevant big-endian architecture is s390x

The adjacent POWER architecture is also still relevant - but as you say, they too can afford a support contract.

The adjacent POWER architecture seems to be used in ppc64le mode these days.

For Linux, yes. AIX and IBM i still run big.

The latter can definitely afford a support contract.

Likely because whilst it didn't work out commercially, the ideas smalltalk, prolog and other more esoteric languages (forth, apl) focus on are themselves very interesting.

In what world did Prolog not work out commercially? It's still used where it makes sense to do so.

oh, thanks! I didn't know that Prolog was still used commercially.

> Humans trust. Their systems should too.

And indeed as Thompson showed, you've got to trust at some point...

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/R209/Reflections-Trus...

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by

I feel this is one of the reasons I liked Fire upon the Deep with the group mind based Tines

Cool story - thanks for sharing it!

This is exceedingly nasty. Well Done!

more the names then the functions themselves

For those who may not be familiar:

CAR = Contents of Address Register, corresponding to the head element of a list.

CDR = Contents of Decrement Register, corresponding to a pointer to the "rest" of a list, i.e. to a machine word containing the next link in the list.

This is hinted at in the paper by this:

> "Each computer word of a list in addition to containing a datum also contains the address of the word containing the next element of the list. 0 for the address of the next element indicates the last element. If one element of an expression is a subexpression the word corresponding to this element contains the address of the word containing the first element of the subexpression. In the IBM 704 or 709 whose 36 bit word is divided (for the convenient use of certain machine instructions) into two 15 bit parts (address and decrement) and two 3 bit parts (prefix and tag) lists are represented by storing in the decrement part of a word the address (in our system actually the complement of the address) of the next word or the list."

The choice of names is rather implementation-specific (and if memory serves, this may have been a choice by the person who coded the original LISP interpreter, not McCarthy himself.) But the mapping of the abstract concept of a linked list to a usable machine representation, built into the core of a programming language, was impressive. FORTRAN and COBOL had nothing like this.