So then I guess C is salamander. Also lays eggs and lives by a pool, but doesn’t do anything extra, and is a necessary step before most of the other modern languages.

COBOL is a coelacanth. To everyone’s surprise, they’re still out there. We thought they were an old, very extinct example of a non-terrestrial lobe-finned fish, but they actually hung on in some odd environments. They cause massive indigestion to anyone that has to consume them.

If Node is a mosquito, Javascript itself is another hymenopteran: the yellow jacket wasp. Just as hated, and with a tendency to injure handlers, but widely successful and defended as filling an actual useful role in nature. They build delicate, arguably pretty nests.

Roaches don’t spread nearly as much disease as 'squiters, and IIRC are actually important in some ecosystems.

Hmm, let me try this.

Edit: Nice! For anyone else, just copy the link from the source of the comment.

Yeah, no joke. That would be awesome, and they wouldn’t be scared off by the paper terrorism.

When Mexico sends us us people, they’re not sending their best. /s

I… Actually don’t know.

The real time clock continues to move in real time under reasonable conditions. If it’s in a weird year it’s either because you’ve decided to run a disk you found in a cave, left by the Ancient Ones, or you’re cheating at Animal Crossing.

I’m a little unclear on how the rest of the clocks typically work together. If your program is drawing from one that gets stopped for a while, I guess yeah, a minute could totally be weeks long, and I’m in the picture as a falsehood believer.

Actually, while mathematically heavy, it’s easy to measure in GR, assuming you’ve got a metric solved (If you don’t, you’re fucked. That shit is intractable to the point where you can name every exact solution on one page, and inexact solutions can just be lies) However, you may have to ask additional questions about what sort of time you want, which probably stems from why you need it.

16. Ok, but the time on the server clock and time on the client clock would never be different by a matter of decades.
17. The system clock will never be set to a time that is in the distant past or the far future.

Does this come up? I feel like if you’re doing retrocomputing you assume a certain level of responsibility for your software breaking.

22. Ok, but the duration of one minute on the system clock will be pretty close to the duration of one minute on most other clocks.
23. Fine, but the duration of one minute on the system clock would never be more than an hour.
24. You can’t be serious.

You can’t be, can you? Ditto on that being the user’s problem. My thing also isn’t portable onto Zeus Z-2 or a billiard ball computer you built in your garage.

There’s some weird shit in the crowdsourced ones. I don’t even know where to start.

Clock misalignment comes up pretty frequently in some networking and networking-esque applications. Otherwise, yeah, the edge cases are indeed on the edge.

Subsecond precision comes up often in common applications too, but you can just expand out to milliseconds or whatever.

I’m guessing it’s not alone. Every time format should come with a distance function and order function, or equivalent. If you have a life, that could mean something like subtraction.

Unfortunately, “should” isn’t always enough. Optimally there’s also type structure to the return of the function so you can’t mix up seconds and days, or calendar and (one of the) standard length days.

Re: The mouseover text, is there a standard frame of reference for really general space stuff? I propose a frame comoving with the CMB and reaching the center of the Earth at Epoch 0 if not.

Inb4 the JavaScript fanboys appear and argue a bad tool is fine if you’re a genius, actually. Why aren’t you a genius?

Everyone who’s little-r rich claims to be middle/working class, and every private jet guy claims to have grown up middle/working class. I once had an expat from a poor country tell me average people back home have servants, which is mathematically impossible given servants are people too.

You see, they worked for and earned their money fair and square, unlike some other, slightly richer people. And then there’s some that just straight up buy into “meritocracy”, and think the African children are lazy.

They don’t unless the board shakeup was bigger than I realise. OpenAI is a nonprofit, and could even shut down and destroy everything if they felt it advanced their mission. Microsoft could sue them, but would probably lose, because that’s what the agreed to when they bought into the capped-profit subsidiary.

Good point.

Relevant XKCD.

If coding teaches you anything well, there’s no bound to the different ways you can screw up. Don’t use bad languages on purpose.

I did know the difference, but I didn’t realise it ran one line at a time! I had kind of assumed it at least did one pass through everything before giving output. Thanks.

I’m familiar with the early history, I’ve dabbled in it in modern times, and of course I’ve seen all the ways it’s bad memed about ad-infinitum (and have to agree).

I didn’t really think I had to be able to write a book on it to say it doesn’t deserve the use it gets, and I don’t think it’s outrageous to imagine that there’s a connection with the hasty genesis. So, I mentioned that off-hand. If it’s actually unconnected my bad.

Alright, thanks for the help with terminology. I’m a bit confused about changing types at runtime. I thought a compiled or interpreted language stopped having types at runtime, because at that point it’s all in assembly. (In this case of course it’s scripting, which someone pointed out to me elsewhere)

The standard itself is 7-bit, since wires were deemed more valuable than endpoint logic for the teletype machines way back then. If you’re running it on an 8-bit byte machine you could do it either way, although I’m not sure what the point in parity checking individual characters is. Modern software uses 0.