@tinytoydragon @lyskar
1998: IRC? lol anon, why don't you use ICQ instead, it's much better.
2002: IRC? lol anon, just install MSN, stop being such a nerd.
2006: IRC? lol anon, with Skype you can make phone calls for free.
2010: IRC? lol anon, Chat is all you need, everybody is there already.
2014: IRC? lol anon, you should try WhatsApp, you can even send voice messages.
2018: IRC? lol anon, that's prehistoric! you should checkout Discord and Slack, so much better.
It's actually true--a #Scheme that provides a REPL isn't R6RS-compliant.
"With many technical standards, implementations that ignore any of the standard's absolute requirements would be severely crippled or unusable. With the R6RS, however, implementations that ignore the standard's absolute requirements become more usable than implementations that take those requirements seriously." --William Clinger
Will Clinger makes an excellent argument for adopting R7 and not looking back. "[I]t turns out that the R7RS can be implemented while preserving near-perfect backward compatibility with the R6RS standard... When this is done, as in Larceny v0.98, R6RS #Scheme becomes a proper subset of R7RS Scheme." (h/t John Cowan) http://andykeep.com/SchemeWorkshop2015/papers/sfpw1-2015-clinger.pdf
Human culture temporarily moves online, and discovers what a nightmare copyright law has created there. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200325/17011244174/copyright-is-broken-covid-19-pandemic-revealing-just-how-messed-up-our-permission-based-culture-is.shtml
Apropos of absolutely nothing, this Star Trek Continues episode is pretty great.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/98076892?byline=0&portrait=0&autoplay=1
@zig Er, “GNU's mix of freedom-respecting values and rigid top-down organization is pretty bizarre.”
More like ‘cathedral’, amirite?
There's been a big revival in interest in term-search recently. Coq has been looking for a better tactics system. Kanren and friends grew a meta-evaluator that can synthesize programs. The glorious fights about Scheme metaprogramming systems. Turnstile and Cur.
There's also smaller things like Typed Racket, which implies term search by its lack of support for type search.
I'm unusually optimistic about the next two decades.
"Terminal automation allowed the Gopher team to rip the doors off of every information silo on campus and beyond." Stories like this help us recognize that libre access to information is critical to both the history of the Internet and to its continued relevance. It's sad to think of the likely CFAA suits this work would trigger now. h/t @rain1 #gopher https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses
"You talk about deus ex machina, well, we're talking about deus *in* machina. You start by thinking there's a god in the box. And then you find there isn't anything in the box. *You* put the god in the box." --Lee Felsenstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Felsenstein
Dragging GHC into the 1990's