It's not as good as ed: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

The estimable (inestimable?) Daniel Estevez wrote excellent blogs on the Voyager comms protocols.

https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

Edwin Berlekamp significantly reduced (by half I think) the number of transistors required for the Reed-Solomon error correcting code by telling them to use a non-standard 'primitive element'

The weirdest thing to me is that the quantisation matrix isn’t symmetrical in the top left to bottom right diagonal.

“Secret Army” (the “straight” inspiration of the comedy “Allo Allo”) - a dramatised version of the Belgian Comete line that returned allied airmen to Britain still stands up as a superb series from the 70s.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8ae0po

> For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.

I wonder if that's 19 Jan 2038. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

RHEL 10 lacks 32-bit x86 packages, so it goes past that date. RHEL 9 support ends before that date.

I thought this was going to be an article by Rob Pike on control flow in golang...

Or the (mostly forgotten) scripting language Pike (derived from the internal language of a MUD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(programming_language)

I was prepared for a debate on calling _exit() vs exit() vs no explicit exit in Pike. This app is pretty interesting, too though.

there is also the use of return from main(), in particular return -1; which doesn't exit.

i was debating whether i should post this discussion on the pike language discord, but now i will. you two made my day!

I don’t program regularly in Pike. I’ve played with some of the examples from various benchmark and language comparison sites for the most part, but given additional free time it’s a language I’d like to actually use sometimes.

I therefore wasn’t even aware of returning -1 from main() doing that. It’s an interesting thing. I’d like to read about that, but maybe not enough to join the language discord.

"And so the Y10K problem was born"

I just had a Y10K problem. Customer data was using 9999-12-31 23:59:59 as a placeholder value, and our app crashed converting from the customer's timezone to UTC. I learned that Python datetime can't handle Y10K.

I’d better go brush up on my COBOL

Programmer-Archaeologist will be quite a coveted position 300 gigaseconds from now.

"The title is the same as that of a very well-known book by Professor L. E. Dickson (with which ours has little in common). We proposed at one time to change it to 'An introduction to arithmetic', a more novel and in some ways a more appropriate title; but it was pointed out that this might lead to misunderstandings about the content of the book."

            G.H. Hardy and E. M. Wright "An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers"

Looks like they're here:

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/exercises.html

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flphandouts.html