It's a nice coincidence to find this post on HN today as I JUST finished reading Gleick's book. But it was the audiobook version, which I immediately realized was not going to be very effective if I can't see any images or equations. And so it's perfect timing to see this outstanding interactive visualization!
This is an interesting position because that's only simple if you already know it. From the perspective of discoverability, it's literally the worst possible UI, because a string of that length has, say, 30^30 possible combinations, among which only one will produce the desired effect, and a bash prompt gives you no indication of how to arrive at that string.
Haha yeah, I talked my dad into getting me the Borland Turbo C++ compiler for DOS when I was 12 or so and it came with a big ol' thick book that I attempted to teach myself with X-) https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-c/3x
I also learned Turbo Pascal in high school, it's quite a trip returning to that time. I'm pretty sure that was the last year they taught Pascal at that school, and after that.... Java. Well, it was the 90s, I guess.
I read The Road long before I became a father and part of me is, I guess, afraid to read it again now that I have two kids—perhaps because I remember how devastating it was then and suspecting it would be 100x that now. But I do intend to reread it sooner or later.
