Hassam: What would be your advice to young people today who want to get into the field of designing programming languages? Dr. Fahlman: Don’t! Unless you like to do this as a hobby. What I came to understand, after years of work on Common Lisp and the death of Dylan, the ongoing popularity of the hideous C++, and the rise of Java, is that programming languages don’t become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility.

I’ve been running chaos.social for nearly 5 years. A reflection.

YOU’D EXPECTthe longest and most costly phase in the lifecycle of a software product to be the initial development of the system, when all those great features are first imagined and then created. In fact, the hardest part comes later, during the maintenance phase. That’s when programmers pay the price for the shortcuts they took during development.

All modern computers(laptops, phones, pc master race rgb monsters, etc) have somewhat similar components: Processor, Memory, Video Card, Disk and USB controller, WiFi card etc. Some of them are in one single chip and you cant even see them anymore, but they are there. For example there are chips that have Processor and Video Card together. The term for processor is actually CPU - Central processing unit, but we called it processors when we were kids and it kind of make sense, since it processes stuff.