miniblog.

Today I learnt that the original name for DOS was QDOS, for "Quick and Dirty Operating System"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS#QDOS (Seems rather unfortunate that they dropped the Q.)

It's so strange that we talk about languages being slow, and have done for years. Computer performance has increased so much in this time. https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/is-python-slow/ (shared on HN in 2009) discusses Python being slow. My underpowered Thinkpad has 20x the single-threaded performance! https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/73vs3766/AMD-Athlon-64-4000+-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-PRO-4650U Maybe *relative* performance of languages matters more?

I'm working on arity errors in Garden, my toy programming language. Rather than just saying "expected 3, got 4 arguments", I'm trying to report where the extra argument is, or what extra argument was expected.