Everything Flows

My book club recently finished reading Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Programmers love to debate the merits of programming languages, but these debates often devolve into personal preference and hand waving.

My aim here is not to provide a comprehensive overview of Gödel, Escher, Bach but merely to cover what I see as the main threads of the books, as the overlap with my own interests and thoughts.

I’ve been programming computers in one form or another since I was about 13 but it took me almost 30 years to dip my toes into the world of electronics.

While preparing to set up an aquarium for freshwater shrimp, the main concern I had was around the water: Will NYC tap water be suitable?

I stumbled across an old project where I was porting Beej’s guide to network programming to Fortran and was reminded of some pain I endured during that effort due to apparently inaccurate macos manpages.

This is not a post about my overall take on AI, I have neither the energy nor desire to organize those thoughts.

I was lent this book recently by a friend.

Warning, plot spoilers ahead.

This piece began from the above question, my initial belief that “no, C obviously does not have a runtime”, confrontation with various sources online which claimed the contrary, and a subsequent desire to figure out whether they are abusing the word runti…