No wireless? Less space than a Nomad? Lame.

That aged well. Six years later it turned into the iPhone.

Blue Origin just launched two 550kg probes to Mars (1.5 AU from the Sun).

SpaceX sent a similar mass Tesla Roadster on a Mars-crossing trajectory in 2018, Psyche to an asteroid at around 3 AU in 2023, and Europa Clipper to Jupiter/Europa (5.2 AU) in 2024.

Blue Origin just launched two 550kg probes to Mars (1.5 AU from the Sun).

SpaceX sent a similar mass Tesla Roadster on a Mars-crossing trajectory in 2018, Psyche to an asteroid at around 3 AU in 2023, and Europa Clipper to Jupiter/Europa (5.2 AU) in 2024.

I still don't understand how Musk can promise a Mars launch next year every year and not at least send something, no matter how small, to Mars.

It would hardly be the first time he' demonstrated a casual approach to the truth

It would be a waste of time to develop right now, if it isn't on starship it would be a dead end in terms of progress. So they are better off just waiting until starship can be sent.

I guess they haven't had a customer who has wanted to send something to Mars yet. If they have sent something to Europa it's not like Mars is harder.

Blue Origin got patents on landing on a drone ship a decade ago. Until today they'd never done it.

Not sure what your point is, other than hatred.

No reason why they wouldn't have Starlink today. Or you could take your own Starlink Mini.

The feature I want is multimethods -- function overloading based on the runtime (not compile time) type of all the arguments.

Programming with it is magical, and its a huge drag to go back to languages without it. Just so much better than common OOP that depends only on the type of one special argument (self, this etc).

Common Lisp has had it forever, and Dylan transferred that to a language with more conventional syntax -- but is very near to dead now, certainly hasn't snowballed.

On the other hand Julia does it very well and seems to be gaining a lot of traction as a very high performance but very expressive and safe language.

I think this is a major mistake for Zig's target adoption market - low level programmers trying to use a better C.

Julia is phenomenally great for solo/small projects, but as soon as you have complex dependencies that _you_ can't update - all the overloading makes it an absolute nightmare to debug.

For what it's worth, that hasn't been my experience with Julia – I've found it easier to debug than Python, Scala, or Clojure (other languages I've used at jobs.)

The tooling makes it easy to tell which version of a method you're using, though that's rarely an issue in practice. And the fact that methods are open to extension makes it really easy to fix occasional upstream bugs where the equivalent has to wait for a library maintainer in Python.

500kloc Julia over 4 years, so not a huge codebase, but not trivial either.

Ada has them, and I guess we all agree on its systems programming nature.

NOOOO!

What Ada (and Rust) calls generics is very different -- it is like template functions in C++.

In those languages the version of the function that is selected is based on the declared type of the arguments.

In CLOS, Dylan, Julia the version of the function that is selected is based on the runtime type of the actual arguments.

Here's an example in Dylan that you can't do in Ada / Rust / C++ / Java.

    define method fib(n) fib(n-1) + fib(n-2) end;
    define method fib(n == 0) 0 end;
    define method fib(n == 1) 1 end;

The `n == 1` is actually syntactic sugar for the type declaration `n :: singleton(1)`.

The Julia version is slightly more complex.

    fib(n) = fib(Val(n))
    fib(::Val{n}) where {n} = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
    fib(::Val{0}) = 0
    fib(::Val{1}) = 1
    
    println(fib(30))

This is perhaps a crazy way to write `fib()` instead of a conventional `if/then/else` or `?:` or switch with a default case, but kinda fun :-)

This of course is just a function with a single argument, but you can do the same thing across multiple arguments.

    define method ack(m, n) ack(m-1, ack(m, n-1)) end;
    define method ack(m == 0, n) n+1 end;
    define method ack(m, n == 0) ack(m-1, 1) end;

You missed the way Ada does OOP, and went completely overboard talking about generics.

As you can see from my comment history, I am quite aware of CLOS, Lisp variants and Dylan.

Last I checked, Ada does not have multimethods/generic functions in the sense of CLOS, Dylan and Julia. It has static function overloading, and single-argument dispatch, just like C++.

>The feature I want is multimethods -- function overloading based on the runtime (not compile time) type of all the arguments.

>Programming with it is magical, and its a huge drag to go back to languages without it. Just so much better than common OOP that depends only on the type of one special argument (self, this etc).

Can you give one or two examples? And why is programming with it magical?

For a start it means you can much more naturally define arithmetic operators for a variety of built in and user-defined types, and this can all be done with libraries not the core language.

Because methods aren't "inside" objects, but just look like functions taking (references to) structs, you can add your own methods to someone else's types.

It's really hard to give a concise example that doesn't look artificial, because it's really a feature for large code bases.

Here's a tutorial example for Julia

https://scientificcoder.com/the-art-of-multiple-dispatch

Thanks.

Erlang/Elixir also has that

Intel has had a terrible habit of overcomplicating all of their attempts at a "serious" ISA and CPU -- iAPX432, I860, IA64 -- in absolutely impractical and crippling ways, while the stop-gap shitty little 16 bit 8086 [1] accidentally got used by the largest computer company in the world (because the far better M68000 was late) and untold gazillions of dollars fell on Intel.

[1] Morse was given three months to design the ISA -- shades of Eich later having 10 days to design Javascript

Did you know each other at Apple?

Long long ago, in 2009, Graydon was my official on-boarding mentor when I joined the Mozilla Javascript team. Rust already existed then but, as he notes, was quite different then. For one thing, it was GC'd, like Fil-C. Which I like -- I write a lot of my C/C++ code using Boehm GC, have my own libraries designed knowing GC is there, etc.

Yeah we interacted at Apple

Many systems, especially older ones, are set up this way by default.

But you can get, for extra $$, a switch to disconnect you from the grid entirely when it's down and run from your own solar power / battery. People who live in cities with underground wires normally don't bother, but it's essential in the countryside (IMHO).

Note however that many people have only maybe 5kW or 8kW or something like that being added to grid power by their solar setup, so if there is no mains power then it doesn't take many 2kW appliances (microwave, kettle, clothes washer (when heating water), dish washer (ditto), hairdryer, vacuum cleaner) to overload it. Not to mention 3kW hot water heater or 3kW+ stove oven.

I have a 3600W off-grid system (Pecron E3600LFP) and I run pretty much all that stuff from it. I added up and I could try to turn on 14kW of stuff at the same time. But I don't, obviously.

Same here in rural far north New Zealand.

I actually counted the number of outages after I got my battery unit in June -- it was six in five weeks, for anything from a couple of seconds to 30 minutes, which I noticed because the unit clicked over to running from the battery, and the clock on the oven (which is still only mains powered) flashes until I go over and hit a button.

In April I had a 40 hour outage after a storm. That's what caused me to order the brand new Pecron E3600LFP, first New Zealand model shipment in "early" June (I received mine June 19).

In February 2023 I had a 4 day outage during/after a storm.

There are even, every 2 or 3 months, scheduled and notified 9 AM - 3 PM outages for equipment maintenance, tree trimming etc. Just those alone lower the grid reliability to around 99.5%.

Six days outage in three years -- let's call it four -- drops grid reliability by another 0.4%.

So, yeah, two 9s is about right.

With the Pecron base unit (US$999 at the moment still on Halloween special, $1259 before that) I simply don't notice any outage under 4 hours, and that's even with a full winter heating load. In fact I deliberately turn the mains to it off from 7-9 AM and 5-9 PM every day.

A 4 hour outage was a little close sometimes, so in August I added a 3kWh expansion battery ($699 on pecron.com right now).

With 6kWh I can run my fridge, computers, Starlink, some LED lighting for 36 hours. Or 30 hours with typical kitchen appliance usage added (espresso machine, toaster, kettle, microwave, air fryer).

Or virtually forever now I added 6x 440W solar panels (cost me US$400 total) to it, which still generates around 200W between them in even the worse overcast and rain.

I'm running this stuff as a mini off-grid system, not connected to the house wiring at all -- except plugged into a standard socket to charge the battery if needed. I also have a $450 2kW petrol generator which I can use to charge the battery if needed, but needing that should be very rare.

Total cost: under US$3k. More like $2.3k at the current Halloween special prices.

https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/1984782313386099022

He mentions diode logic and points out the drawback of the limited output current, but doesn't mention the obvious solution of a transistor in voltage-follower configuration.

I always thought RTL was pretty nifty, and it was used in a lot of early computers. I think it's a lot less fussy of component values than the earlier RTL.