I am Italian as well and love the joke, but it always makes it sound like any other culture doesn’t use their hands to convey meaning, which is obviously false. I do not notice a large difference between a northern Italian like me and any other American speaker, for instance.
Of course there will be a noticeable increase in gesticulation in an angry southern Italian person compared to a mild-mannered Englishman droning about philosophy.
Perhaps the difference lies not in the amount of gesturing, but in the heightened emotions of us southern Europeans.
> Of course there will be a noticeable increase in gesticulation in an angry southern Italian person compared to a mild-mannered Englishman droning about philosophy.
> Perhaps the difference lies not in the amount of gesturing, but in the heightened emotions of us southern Europeans.
As someone that has familial ties to both England and Sicily, although people on average are more overtly expressive in Southern Europe, the English are certainly not a monolith. For every "mild-mannered Englishman" there's also an equal amount of very "expressive" people, for example the meme of English tourists being absolute menaces in Southern Europe (especially Spain) does not come from the "mild-mannered" crowd, and I'm sure there are people who put up with these tourists that wish they were less expressive than the locals.
I use TLPI as an optional text for my CS Operating Systems course! It's honestly the best resource for a comprehensive look at the innards of Linux. I actually even snip select pages for lectures.
People should do a foundation course to figure out which deprecated parts of the kernel source to avoid. It is nontrivial, but talking with the active developers will save a lot of guess work. =3
I count myself among this group. I actually emailed Adams sometime around 1999 or so to ask him a question about a game that I thought was his. Turns out, the game was included in a collection of Adams's games on the TI-994a (the game was called Knight Ironheart) and was in the same exact style and used the same interpreter as his own games.
He was super nice about it, explaining that he didn't actually author that game. We exchanged a few more emails back and forth, but overall a great experience chatting with him over the earlyish Internet. I feel very fortunate that I grew up in an era of computing where it seemed much smaller than it does today.
One of the highlights of my youth was attending Apple convention in boston in the 1980s and meeting Lord British (Richard Garriot). He saw that I liked the game and asked me to stand in the kiosk and teach people how to play it.
I’m curious why they chose MDL rather than Lisp for it. Sure, it would have been ancient MACLISP or whatever, but why not leverage what was already in wide use at MIT at the time?
MDL is what was in wide use at MIT at the time, the PDP-10 era. The M in MDL is sometimes "MIT" in the various backronyms of what it stood for. (Mostly it was apparently just short for "muddle", a self-deprecating description.)
(Also, to be technically correct, these source files aren't even MDL, they are a further descendant called ZIL [Zork Implementation Language].)
It sounds like from what I've read MACLISP and MDL were side-by-side for a while at MIT and something of a department choice. MACLISP sounds like the serious effort and I read MDL as the "hip" or maybe rebellious upstart with a weirder sense of humor (it was called Muddle and spelled MDL to make it seem like an appropriately serious acronym), which would also make some sense that Zork originated in that allowed to be sillier language.
(Also, in reading other comments around here, I've learned there's a deeper connection in MDL to Scheme than I knew before, so I hadn't realized the Lisp/Scheme split even has ties to this "competition" of Lisp languages at MIT.)
Because Zork was written on the MIT Dynamic Modeling PDP-10. MDL was an important part of the software ecosystem on that computer, but Lisp wasn't. On the other MIT PDP-10 computers, Maclisp reined.
Was there any particular reason they did that, or was it just a random coincidence (that was the team that wrote it and the hardware they had access to was that particular machine and that particular machine ran MDL, otherwise, it would have been MACLISP)? Was there anything about MDL that helped with writing an adventure game?
MDL is also from MIT and supposedly stood for More Datatypes than Lisp. According to wikipedia "MDL provides several enhancements to classic Lisp. It supports several built-in data types, including lists, strings and arrays, and user-defined data types. It offers multithreaded expression evaluation and coroutines."
Seems that most of it's novelties were eventually added into LISP proper.
It’s very Lispy, but it’s not strictly Lisp. Why, for instance, use “<“ and “>” to surround various forms but not others? If they were to make a mini-Lisp, I’d expect something more like Gnu Emacs Lisp, something that’s obviously a Lisp, but heavily influenced by the Lisps of the day. I’ve found a few old MDL manuals linked from Wikipedia, but none of them have any sort of “Here’s why we created MDL” section that I could find.
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