This isn't what the commentators are referring to when they talk about "the flip".
Rockets traditionally have some type of separation mechanism to separate stage 1 and stage 2. This is usually some type of pyro charge or an actual pneumatic pusher. SpaceX wants to avoid this complexity with Starship and instead "throw" off stage 2 (Starship) by doing a flip with the booster. I don't believe it's been done before for stage separation, but this is also how they deploy Starlink satellites. [0]
Obviously, something went wrong in stage separation today so Booster+Starship just continually flipped. We don't know exactly what the true flip will look like.
Truly one of the best books in our field; very well done.
Doing the tree-walk interpreter (the first “half” of the book) took two weekends, working much of the day on Saturdays and Sundays.
When I went through it, I built my interpreter in another language, and added other features as I went along. Both helped solidify the concepts. I often had to pull out my additional features as I learned better in subsequent chapters; getting to see the difference between my amateur approach versus the author’s experienced methods was quite helpful!
> One way to get at this: making your own language will show you not only what each thing means, but also what the underlying mechanics are!
True, but if everyone who asked any question about something had to implement those things to even understand the basics of them, we'd never get anything done :)
For what it's worth, most CS degrees do involve building a programming language.
You don't need a degree to be a developer (I don't have one) but I think it's a good indication that it is actually reasonable to think that every developer could implement a programming language. (And I mean developer as in someone who writes code professionally as their main job, not necessarily sysadmins or designers or whatnot).
To reiterate, I think many more people than think they can can develop their own language.
On my personal site, I've published my explorations (so far) on the future of personal computing, by way of designing an "operating system of the future."
The content and the design of your site look excellent, well done. I think the lab notes format for longer term projects works well to group ideas.
Is there any way to preview what is in the member magazine? It looks compelling but hard to tell if it crosses into purchase territory from the outside.
