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.
I've had a Gemini Capsule (what Gemini calls a 'website/blog' since about 2021. It gets very little traffic, but it's fun to have. Browsing the smallweb is nice in the evenings when I want a high signal-to-noise ratio of interesting content.
> I would be immensely skeptical of this unless he was talking about something much more narrow, like how there's a fraction of people who have really unfortunate genetics and can only improve their blood lipids with medication.
I am one of those unfortunate genetic people, sadly, and have had high cholesterol numbers since my early 20s. Most of my older grandparents passed from heart disease. Now in my 40s, have a decent diet, and my numbers are < 100 for LDL. Current (and previous) PCPs have indicated to me that diet will have little effect for me, and that I will likely be on statins for most of my life. Experiments with stopping the statins have shot my LDL numbers through the roof.
The good news is that it's a pretty low dose with decently high effect.
both of my parents have low cholesterol, my mom's cholesterol is naturally under 200, my dad is on statins but the highest he ever got was about 230. they are in their 80s. Nobody on any side of my family (for which I have about 25 first cousins) has ever had any heart disease of any kind, no bypass surgeries, no heart attacks, nothing.
I'm familiar with the genetically high cholesterol thing and when you look at that you see parents/grandparents having heart attacks in their 40's. nothing like any of that in my family.
anyway yes im on the statins and probably need to boost my dose a little more to be below 200.
I teach CS at a state university, specifically computer security. At the beginning of this semester, I did a poll of my students and asked if they use any form of ad-blocking. Less than a third of my students did, and not many more even knew about browsers other than Chrome or Safari. This was out of a class of ~110.
Granted, it's anecdotal, but if 66% of my upper-division CS students don't even know about Firefox and ad-blocking, than I seriously doubt many non-tech people do.
Similarly, after that lecture, I had a student come to my office hours and ask for more info about ad-blockers. I had them open up msn.com and showed them the large banner ad on the page. It took a few seconds for them to even realize they were being advertised to! I then showed them my browser, nice and ad-free.
I get the impression that people have gotten so used to ads flashing in their face that they gloss over them. But the damage is still done.
Although I didn't collect numbers, but I made a similar experience in my workplace. I assume many people are highly distracted by ads and work efficiency is even reduced. Even many software engineers seem to not be aware of ublock... Would be interesting to know how many students started using an ad blocker at the end of your lecture :)
I did a poll in my CS class last year and half the students knew of it. This is a trade school level CS class so the number struck me as impressive. In another light, it is pretty low.
No, the brain doesn’t Adblock, that’s the misconception. It gets used to ads to a point where it is not registered _consciously_ anymore. But the ad works subconsciously very well, armies of marketing people studied this.
I think the conclusion of this article is slightly flawed. The issue isn't with engagement with the training (although, the typical corporate training material is pretty bad), rather how we go about teaching cybersecurity.
I take a page from Jayson E. Street's DefCon talk from a few years ago with my students: promote "Security Awareness", not Security Training. Get people to think about what is being asked of them and the consequences of said actions. People tend to take "Security Training" as "I need to remember A, B, C, etc." Humans are bad at this sort of thing, typically.
I admit that "Security Awareness" isn't all that easy, but clearly our current approaches leave much to be desired.
