Brasstacks

I saw a link on reddit the other day regarding some math-related videos, including a series of lectures by Don Knuth , including some on TeX internals. (One frustrating bit about the Web video is the blurriness of his terminal. Another is that he uses what is now a slightly-out-of-date version of TeX itself). He made a comment near the beginning of section 3, probably similar to things he has written, to the effect that in his education he had benefited both from reading badly-written programs, because they were evidence he could do better, and from well-written programs, because they were a pleasure to read. He then wondered aloud which category TeX is in, but that either way it was a win. I'm not at all sure myself. Perhaps TeX is a monument to the best that can be done in Pascal, and simultaneously a warning that it is the best that can be done in Pascal. I had a definite feeling during grad school, when I was learning LaTeX to write my thesis, and learning Lisp on the side,...

I wanted to store a link to Alastair Bridgewater's (a.k.a. nyef on IRC) SBCL-based LispOS notes . Nyef's most apparent distinguishing characteristic is an amazing willingness to hack low-level internals on Intel x86-based Lisp implementations. Given the claim that " The classic problem with the 'LispOS Project' is that a large portion of the early effort would involve low level hardware hacking ", nyef seems to be the ideal candidate for overcoming that problem. Also, just wanted to record a link to a vendor selling the remnants of the Interlisp environment. Seems like for something under US$3000, one can purchase a x86-Linux-compatible version of the Interlisp programming environment.