Notices by David Mankins (lain_7@tldr.nettime.org)

@thegibson @screwtape that's the town mentioned in the musical opening for John Carpenter's *Dark Star*, isn't it?

"My body roams the universe, but my heart lies there with you "

@goatsarah @stevegis_ssg

Εμμηνόπαυση (Eminopause) was the Greek word for menopause, so, while I don’t know what the -archy word be, but one would clearly refer to the rulers as “Your Eminence”

@graydon @cstross @karchie

Is it time to drag this out?

https://xkcd.com/224/

@cstross @karchie @graydon

Don’t forget APL and LISP, both predating SNOBOL (APL, as a language instead of a notation, was roughly contemporary with MUMPS, I think).

Interestingly, both APL and LISP basically started as *notations* — a better, parchment-preserving means to remember your incantations.

APL also has the cachet of arcane symbols.

@alcinnz

Scheme might be a good alternative to Forth.

One of the nicest features of Scheme (and other LISPs) is the lack of syntax — everything is an S-expression. So parsing is trivial and you can concentrate on other aspects of the language.

A LISPer friend once joked to me that he’d picked up a compiler book thinking he might learn some tricks, but it turned out the whole book was about tokenizing and parsing, which he considered a solved problem. And, of course, there’s Alan Kay’s comment about how one half page of the *Lisp 1.5 Manual* by McCarthy amounted to “the Maxwell’s Equations of programming”.

Google “scheme in one defun” for a simple C implementation. Peter Norvig has a one-page implementation in Python.

@robpike @nytimes

Oh, I remember her theory about “Mona Leo” — that the Mona Lisa is a covert self-portrait, argued on the basis that you can line up Mona Lisa’s face with a true self-portrait of Davinci and the features line up perfectly.

I thought it was quite plausible.

@niconiconi @lanodan

I heard that as "Write once, debug everywhere"

@niconiconi “/bin/cat went off to Berkeley and came back waving flags”, Pike once said