I'm not American, grew up on a Caribbean island. When I was little milkweed was everywhere, including our yard. Consequently monarch butterflies were everywhere.
But we fought the milkweeds cause nobody wanted them in their yard cause before long it's all you had.
We won the war but we don't have as many monarch butterflies anymore.
Here it had nothing to do with pesticides, we just destroyed their lifecycle.
My favorite subject when studying CompSci (TU Delft) was called "Concepts of programming languages". We learned C, Scala (for functional) and Javascript (prototypes).
It made learning Elixir years later much easier.
We also had a course that basically summed up to programming agents to play Unreal Tournament in a language called GOAL which was based on Prolog.
For years I've wanted to use Prolog but could not figure out how. I ended up making a spellcheck to allow LLM's to iterate over and fix the dismal Papiamentu they generate.
The Unreal Tournament was the coolest thing I've ever seen. I think they shut it down the year after mine. (Now they have boring old regular AI like everyone else!)
I haven't found a good use for Prolog, though I haven't put much effort into it. I admit I was much more impressed by GOAL though, and I didn't realize until recently that you can replicate the whole thing in a more "ordinary" language (and that this gives many benefits). D'oh!
I took a similar class in college, and I'm also glad I did, even though the professor was kinda rubbish.
Even having the thinnest surface level understanding of the other ur-languages is so useful (and even more-so with assembly). I can't do anything useful with them, but it helps keep you from the "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" trap if you're at least aware of the existence of screwdrivers.
Same, our professor was okay, but he introduced a new system for the course that year, Weblab. I see it still exists and I have no doubt it works flawless now but every exam except the last ones was a mess.
And regarding the screwdriver, I fully agree. Especially with AI I can use the right tool for any job, despite me not being able to use it directly.
After spending way too much time thinking about how I would program in a language I never heard about I realized that as a native Dutch speaker Nynorsk is fairly readable.
As a Norwegian with passable German, written Dutch feels almost like just jumbling some letters around and adding unnecessary consonants... (Spoken Dutch, though, is entirely incomprehensible to me) The language continuum around the North Sea is fairly tight (more so if you consider Low German instead of standard German so you don't need to deal with the effects of the annoying High German consonant shift (think Dag -> Tag, Schip -> Schiff etc.))
I once had some Norwegian room mates in Ireland, and whenever we collectively couldn't find the proper English word, we usually got lucky with our native tongues. When listening to Scandi TV series, I'm still surprised more than I should be by the occasional match (recently: suddenly -> "plutselig", similar to German "plötzlich").
Now, as for the Danish room mate, he might as well have been speaking Greek.
In Norway, Danish is sometimes subjected to friendly ridicule as sounding like Norwegian spoken with a potato in your mouth...
Danish is if anything ever so slightly closer to German in vocabulary and grammar, but the pronunciation is another matter.
The effect is bigger in writing. In high school I worked my way through Faust in German by finding an old Danish translation as a parallel text - the old Danish version was a decent halfway point when I struggled too much with the German, and helped me find similarities I wouldn't otherwise.
I studied in Trondheim for a semester and learned some Norwegian. Whenever I didn't know a word, I just pronounced the Dutch or English word in a 'Norwegian way'. Most of the time people didn't even blink. So much so that I'd then ask them if the word I just used existed and invariably the answer was that that was the correct word.
When I was a young lad, must have been 20 I came across some programming books, including programming in Ada.
I read so much of it but never wrote a line of code in it, despite trying. Couldn't get the build environment to work.
But the idea of contracts in that way seemed so logical. I didn't understand the difference this article underpins though. I learned Java and thought interfaces were the same.
How can node scripts write to files, make network requests, etc etc without any standard library? Of course it has a standard library. You could maybe say javascript doesn't have much of a standard library (Array, String, Promise, Error, etc) but js is used with a runtime that will have a standard library.
Lua will forever hold a special place in my heart. It was the first programming language that I actually managed to learn, instead of just attempting to learn it.
It was chosen around 2008 or so to be the scripting language in Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas.
We build entire worlds in Lua, there were many gamemodes, but my favorite was Roleplay.
This is the fairly standard Apple defensework where "it just works, but if it doesn't work it's probably not a real problem" despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
But we fought the milkweeds cause nobody wanted them in their yard cause before long it's all you had.
We won the war but we don't have as many monarch butterflies anymore.
Here it had nothing to do with pesticides, we just destroyed their lifecycle.
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