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Have you had your thyroid levels tested? My problem was mostly hypothyroidism.

The C Programming Language for pointers, which didn't make any sense to me in Pascal.

Thank you!

I was laid off from Eazel when their funding fell through in the 2001 dot-com crash. The founders were ex-Apple people and they arranged for Apple to interview those of us who had …

In my case it was hypothyroidism. See a doctor.

"3990 Old Town Avenue, San Diego" is permanently burned into my brain. I was finally in that neighborhood about 10 years ago and visited the shrine myself, even though any evidence…

If only these sorts of workarounds really worked when your brain doesn't have enough of the right chemicals. "Can't make myself do the thing" turns out to be called ADHD, and T3+T4…

Types and especially structured types. https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

Semicolons came in with Algol 58 too, which used them in what now seems like a really excessive way.

Thanks. My major public project for map utilities has been Tippecanoe, https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe

That was a common convention at the time and you can also see it in early BASIC manuals.

For is also from Algol, replacing "do" from Fortran. I agree it would be interesting to know why the word was chosen, but I think it comes from the mathematical "for all x in Y, x …

Thanks. It has been cited as confusing in sources like The Elements of Programming Style, but I can appreciate that it may feel natural to some people, and there are certainly case…

I was a linguistics major in college and therefore am a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist about language. When I say I cannot say this, I mean that this construct does not exist …

Actually, no, you are right: I seem to have received one email message that begins a sentence with "else" in 1996 and another in 2003. So it is not unknown to me, but it is quite r…

This is a usage that I have no memory of ever encountering in any context other than computer programming. It may be in some dialects, but not in ones I have come in conscious cont…

Algol was not prone to abbreviation. Algol 58 used "or if," so if they had wanted "or else," they would have used "or else."

Looks like this article was the source of the Twitter thread https://twitter.com/geoffwozniak/status/1337916048276852737 where I revived the discussion of my talk.

I said I can't say it, not that no one can say it. It is not in my dialect.

Thanks for the insider German knowledge!

I am the author, and I mean that I can say "or else" in a normal sentence, but I cannot say "else" without an "or" in normal speech in my normal dialect.

My scan of the print edition (kindly mailed to me many years ago by Doug McIlroy), which includes the historical manpages as well as the commentary: https://archive.org/details/res…

Also A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter Salus, https://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:q...

Whoever wrote the web interface to "p4 blame" at Danger called it "See who made these codes," which always sounded super weird to me

Later versions of Research Unix I believe reserved another standard file descriptor for /dev/tty so it wouldn't have to have magic knowledge.