@cstanhope I wondered the same thing!
Was he constrained by computer power at the beginning? Did he set out to spend three years typing, or was he just fascinated by the results each day?
I don't know the answers, sadly.
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One day I am going to reach the height of technological sophistication, and every clock in my house will handle daylight savings automatically.
I'm not there yet. I think modern appliances are getting better though.
(Does a microwave really need to know the current time?)
I'm implementing an interpreter, and wondering how often I should check for interruptions (e.g. Ctrl-C).
I don't want to spend too much CPU time checking whether I've been interrupted, but I also want slow programs to stop promptly. It's tricky.
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?