Notices by Nick Montfort (nickmofo@mastodon.social)

For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn

Interpretations

1. We wanted them on, but the baby was just too wiggly — we could hardly get the socks on!

2. Babies grow so fast! Before we could use them, the baby was too big

3. Okay, the baby did actually have them on for a bit. But babies don’t walk, so while they were put on the baby, they aren’t truly *worn*

I just learned via @Sempf that Thomas E. Kurtz, co-creator of the BASIC programming language with John Kemeny (1926–1992), has died:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-thomas-e-kurtz-1928-2024/

BASIC isn’t just of historical interest to me. It’s an part of everyday artistic practice: I write programs in Commodore 64 BASIC v2, Applesoft BASIC, and yabasic as often as I can. The language (which became a family of languages for microcomputers) was the lingua franca of popular computing and is still the standard for such.