Microsoft had the Faster CPython team for several years, and then recently laid off some of the core devs and the team lead.

I had a quick look and it looks like the kind of stuff HN likes. There is a lot of luck when posting about what gets picked up. If 1 in 20 get traction though that's quite good (there are only so many slots and many posters)

How hyperbolic are your titles?

Are you saying they need to be hyperbolic to get traction. There is some truth in that.

I really enjoy these lists of interesting features from various languages. They pop up occasionally on HN but now I can’t find them (Hillel Wayne had multiple).

I want a meta list of all these interesting features across languages.

EDIT: I found one! “Micro features I’d like to see in more languages” https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/microfeatures-id-...

I'd love to see more of these. In fact, I think it would make an amazing language feature zoo. Mine are heredoc, underscores to format large number 8_098_162_123

D has them both

Having applied to YC this round with an email product, this is very interesting.

As a professor, I believe virtually all profs should have industry experience and occasionally go back for a year or two. (I’ve bounced back and forth!)

> As a professor, I believe virtually all profs should have industry experience and occasionally go back for a year or two. (I’ve bounced back and forth!)

For quite some professors I imagine that going back to industry would make them a lot more arrogant. In academia, being surrounded by very smart people dampens the arrogance a lot because you realize that you may be smart, but not that smart. On the other hand, in industry you have much less people around you that can intellectually stand up against you, which easily makes you smug.

It depends on the industry. In high tech they would not carry the "professor" shine, they are just one more person in the meeting.

They would also quickly suffer from corporate politics is they are not used to it (and they will be exposed because professor).

OTOH I think they can become more arrogant when they are back to the uni, now that they have seen both worlds

How did that affect getting tenure? My experience watching my advisor go through that process is that an industry stint would negatively impact the process.

There are a lot of variables, but from personal experience it also depends on how you talk about that experience in your tenure dossier. I was able to spin a research finding into a commercial product. Due to intracompany politics, that product never shipped. But my tenure committee talked glowingly about my ability to take a research idea and polish it into something that a major software company would pay me to commercialize.

I wear mechanical watches and have a small (and growing) collection. It’s irrational, but I like them anyway :) I’d appreciate an art piece like this.

The author also wrote about his experience making a space shooter game for the E-Reader:

https://mattgreer.dev/blog/making-a-shooter-for-the-ereader/

This is what I need more of from the internet.

TinyBASIC is fun and beautifully simple. I wrote a 3-part tutorial for making a TinyBASIC-to-C compiler using Python a few years ago.

Let’s make a Teeny Tiny compiler https://austinhenley.com/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html

I know BASIC is kind of a “bad” language, but there’s something so delightful about it. If we’re plugging TinyBASIC projects that others might find interesting, I made an MMO TinyBASIC REPL the other day: http://10klob.com/

People too often complain about original BASIC, and forget most dialects moved away from line numbers and spaghetti GOTOs during the 16 bit days, with widepsread of compilers and structured constructs.

I am really glad that I only got to learn C, after getting through Turbo Basic, Quick Basic, Turbo Pascal[0], doing exactly the same kind of stuff urban myths say it was only possible after C came to be.

[0] - On 16 bit systems, I started coding on an 8bit Timex 2068.

BASIC is an amazing language that computing novices (including humanities majors) could learn in an afternoon, that could be efficiently compiled or compactly interpreted, that was small enough to support dozens of interactive users on a mainframe or minicomputer, or to fit into a tiny 8-bit microcomputer – and yet was largely equivalent to FORTRAN in terms of its expressive power.

I think the closest modern equivalents might be Python (for easy onramp and scalability from microcontrollers to supercomputers) and JavaScript (for pure ubiquity in every device with a web browser.)

I wonder if there is a modern-ish (?) environment that can match Visual BASIC in terms of easy GUI app programming. Perhaps Python or Tcl with Tk (Qt seems harder) or maybe Delphi, or perhaps a modern Smalltalk.

Delphi for sure. And while you have to run it on Windows, it can create binaries for Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

FreePascal and Lazarus get you close on other platforms I think. It’s been ages since I’ve looked into it.

Yes, but I'd argue the price of Delphi is totally worth the issues you would then avoid by not using Lazarus.

I thought Lazarus/FreePascal are 100% compatible with Delphi. Is that not the case?

Well this afternoon bit...

Advanced BASICs are too big for that, and in less advanced ones you get to POKE the hardware to do certain things. Which means you get to learn a bunch of hardware and machine code. That's not all bad though!

Delphi, and naturally Visual Basic for .NET with Windows Forms, not forgeting about C#, however it is getting a bit too much featurities lately, and most likely not what the BASIC target audience would like.

What I like about these projects is that you can make them as simple or as complicated as you want.