A complete highly extensible interpreted language with a built-in editor, macro assembler, etc in under 10k lines of code which did everything any modern scripting language does, except they all require at least 200KLOC to do it in.... This is the most elegant piece of software ever written, bar none. It isn't even a contest.

Creationists have all the air time and chance to express their views anyone could ever wish for. Equal time, what a bunch of crap.

As for the "our views aren't being considered", this is a SCIENCE SHOW, it deals with scientific evidence. The day creationists can show ANY EVIDENCE that the Earth is young, that life forms didn't progressively evolve from simpler to more complex, that there is no single unifying tree of life, etc then they can complain that they haven't gotten a proper scientific airing. Given that they have NOTHING, no contrary testable hypothesis, no evidence that stands up to any scrutiny, etc they've got no leg to stand on. Its too bad for them that their Flying Spaghetti Monster is not science, but it isn't our problem.

Yeah, well, there is that. Once a system can learn then it can change, and it won't ever be really predictable. We'll have to get used to our machines having personality, or else turn back the clock to good old FORTRAN :)

Code exists because code is very flexible and plastic. Its the duct tape of systems. You can do anything in hardware, but we do do everything in code. Once you leave the lower levels of abstraction where you can achieve anything you move into a realm where code, in the form of instructions to computers, just isn't that valuable. Either the assumptions and built in limitations of the platform have to becomes greater and greater in order to reduce complexity, or procedural/declarative/imparative logic are simple not adequate to the task of dealing with higher level things in the real world. We tried 'visual programming', but it didn't actually fix the complexity problems or the brittleness problems, and it only allowed at best a tiny increase in abstraction at a huge cost.

The way forward, IMHO has to be natural learning systems and adaptive systems. The 'ware needs to learn how to write itself. Not sure we will want to call it software anymore at that point.

Yeah, that's the definition I always knew, a Coulomb is one Avagadro's Number of fundamental charges. The problem is that's a great theoretical definition, but actually measuring out 6.022x10^23 electrons is a bit difficult... As someone pointed out earlier in the thread, the error in the known value of NA is about 1 part in 30 billion, which is not bad, but not good enough either. There are some other ways to measure an Amp of course, but they all get complicated rather quickly because you have to know at least 2 other values very precisely.

Indeed, learning assembly language is a real good start. I got my first real understanding of computers by learning PACE machine code. My uncle gave me an S-100 based typesetting workstation he scavenged parts for. I learned by reading the PACE manual (helpfully supplied) and learning about how a computer bootstraps, how the disk drive worked, and most important how the CPU actually works at a low level. I never did get that machine to do a whole lot, but 6 months of wrestling with machine language will really make a good understanding.

What I like about FORTH is its underlying simplicity and elegance. The entire language and all its features are contained in a few 1000 lines of code, and all of it is accessible for experimentation using the outer interpreter. Because the language and the stack machine/inner interpreter are highly exposed in FORTH code it is both easy and necessary for a student to understand how the thing works at a pretty low level. Yet at the same time you can construct powerful domain-specific languages and applications. Certainly powerful enough to satisfy any beginning programmer (and frankly there are plenty of spacecraft, aircraft, and many other systems around that are built using FORTH, its not a toy).

I think its sad that the language and the philosophy of simplicity and transparency of technology has gone out of style. IMHO starting out software engineers on FORTH would be a great boon to the industry. They will go on to other things, but the lesson of simplicity and elegance of design is never lost.

LOL, yeah, you can write it in FORTH in maybe 5 minutes ;)

I think its like other posters have said, the attraction is that you need nothing more than a browser and a text editor to get started with it, and you can see some fairly flashy results quite quickly. You could get flashy results with something like say COLOR FORTH too, but you would have to acquire the software and its not as easy to find an abundance of documentation.

Yeah, I can't really disagree with that. FORTH is perfectly usable, but its not widely employed. I can understand why JavaScript is attractive. Honestly though, I think JavaScript is a terrible language to learn with, and its sad that using something so complex prevents the student from understanding the tool.

JS is nice, but have you ever tried using something like FIG FORTH as a teaching tool? This is some very elegant and simple software with which very powerful things can be done. It certainly is a good intro to the topic of virtual machines, interpretation, binding, and different forms of optimization. An actual debugger is moderately irrelevant, you can interactively step through code. I've had very good luck with this tool.

Very simple, very cheap, no false alarms, and unless you're home invaded by murderous thugs it WILL be effective. Even you ARE home invaded by murderous thugs it will still probably pay off! Everywhere I've lived when I've talked to any law enforcement about home security that's their advice, get a rotweiler, they really do work. They're also a lot cheaper to feed than a kodiak, and probably legal pretty much anywhere.

ALL that matters is if the monitoring company is licensed in your state (most states requires this in the US), and UL Rated. If it is UL approved service, you have the proper permits, etc then you will have ZERO problem with claims. If your insurance company bitches, take them to the state insurance board in your state, they'll cry uncle in approximately 5 seconds flat.

Here are some other things to know. UL Rated monitoring should cost NO MORE THAN $9.00 a month, if you pay more you're getting gouged. NEVER EVER EVER IN A BILLION YEARS sign up with people like ADT where you'll pay some ludicrous fee like $45 a month, plus a land line, plus MORE if you want to use wireless. Don't EVER sign a contract, you can get $9.00 UL monitoring on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The big firms will try to 'give you' all sorts of 'free' equipment to induce you to their overpriced service, its not worth it. ADT might give you $1500 worth of stuff, but they'll lock you into an expensive 3 year contract, and there WILL be hidden fees, little extra things you won't get that you need, etc, so by the time your done the cost will be very significant AND you're still overcharged.

Yeah, that could be true. Personally the chances that I will suddenly, after 10 years of using desktop Linux, care much one way or another about what comes out of Redmond or what they do is dim. Now there is only one proprietary monstrosity left to fear, but is it called Apple or Google? lol.