there is that. but the more detailed points are pretty spot on. the overall picture I'm left with is that if you follow these instructions you're left with a much larger, more fragile, and semantically ambiguous lisp that if you had striven for parsimony.
fwiw I think C isn't a bad source language to make a toy tiny lisp. not because any of the things the author says aren't true, but part of the lesson (or joy) here is building semantic towers. there is a kind of mystery around HLLs, where things like memory management and function application are really magical. writing a lisp is Haskell isn't pointless, but at the same time you're kind of just decorating the cake instead of baking it. doing this in C lets you know that you can build heavyweight abstractions from effectively nothing.
but the right approach is probably to abuse C to make it take the shape of a lisp rather than build out a whole C-like intermediate to bridge the gap. and it should be less than 1k lines unless you're actually trying to build something useful.
Sure, I agree with you (and, for 2/3 of it, I don't much disagree with the OG). I just don't think articles like this hits as hard as it could when a significant portion of it is "now lemme talk about this pet peeve of mine, which I'm very committed to, even though it is at best tangential to purported topic I'm writing about". C may (or may not) be the worst of all possible languages to write a Lisp in (not touching that one :-)), but if you're gonna lecture me about writing a HLL, talk about the language, not dump a bunch of venom into an implementation detail. Or at least be up front and title it "Don't build your own Lisp in a language I hate" or something.
If I'm supposed to buy a robot to clean my house, I personally don't want to have to go looking for where the stupid thing has put my cups and plates or whatever whenever it straightens up. I expect there to be a place for all the things and all the things to be put back in place. That's not "er mah gerd the world is ending because millennials am I right!"; that's "your idiot robot can't do the one job I bought it for".
The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
I personally think the problem here is that they were delusional enough to think this was the way to 'test' their prototype clean-o-bots. But as you point out (and...sigh...you're spot on on all points), we live in a world where doing things like beta-testing robo-cars in real live traffic is perfectly cromulent as long as you capture market share and outlast the lawsuits and 'disrupt' something.
One of Mary Beard's documentaries ('Meet the Romans' I think) touches on Roman insulae. Literal death traps, and seemingly miserably uncomfortable at the best of times. At least you're out of the rain (except on the top floors).
And someone below mentioned 'Plebs', which is the humorous take on all this. Recommended.
I recall some of the Orthodox denominations still do mass in Latin. I visited an Antiochian Orthodox Church for a class where this was the case. I think (it has been a long while) the key phrase you'd look for is 'Western Rite'.
Antiochian (eastern rite) and Assyrian Orthodox both do at least some of their masses in Aramaic, which can be interesting, though there may be a mix of others as well (note that Assyrian is fully independent, whereas Antiochian is in full communion with the broader Easter Orthodox church).
"Western Rite" would be those that adopted Latin or local western languages and traditions- think organs or other musical instruments, unleavened bread, crossing yourself from left to right, etc. The Catholic and Protestant churches are like this, along with a relatively small number of Orthodox churches. "Eastern Rite" are those that follow the Eastern Orthodox traditions, chanting the divine liturgies in older languages, no musical instrumentation, leavened bread, crossing yourself from right to left, etc.
Some Eastern Orthodox use (for all dialogue, they do celebrate mass) a language that's now only referred to as Church Slavonic. [1] Though going down this tangent I can't help but think of that Emo Phillips skit on religion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANNX_XiuA78
Latin (and other "old" languages) can still be found in various ways and places, though that starts to get deep into it, as the "New Catholic Mass" can be said in any language, one of which is Latin.
What more do you need to know? The authoritative sources (I think lwn.net is, but I'm sure there's a ton of 'well, ackshually...' opinions) say he's unwinding his role, and that new people are picking it up. Seems pretty non-alarmist, non-brethless when you get out of the douchebag-sphere are do the basic research. But I guess you don't get clicks for "there's a change, it's being handled by adults, nothing to worry about".
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