The current list is the following; those languages that appear in the Conway Game of Life project appear in bold.

• 1992: QBasic
• 1993: Turbo Pascal
• 1994: ANSI C
• 1995: Delphi
• 1996: JavaScript. Others: HTML
• 1997: Java
• 1998: VBScript. Others: CSS
• 1999: Transact-SQL
• 2000: C#. Others: Prolog
• 2001: C++
• 2002: PHP. Others: C#
• 2003: Objective-C
• 2004: Visual Basic.NET
• 2005: Ruby
• 2006: LINQ. Others: C# 2.0, C++
• 2007: Erlang
• 2008: Python
• 2009: Go
• 2010: Common Lisp
• 2011: Haskell
• 2012: Lua
• 2013: C++ 11
• 2014: Scala
• 2015: Swift. Others: C++ 14
• 2016: Kotlin. Others: Swift 3, Java 1.7
• 2017: TypeScript. Others: 68K Assembler, PHP 7, awk
• 2018: F#. Others: C# 7, Elisp
• 2019: Go. Others: Scheme, Ballerina
• 2020: Smalltalk. Others: COBOL, Rexx
• 2021: Rust. Others: R
• 2022: Dart. Others: Elixir, Crystal, Perl, D
• 2023: Zig. Others: Minimal BASIC, Fortran
• 2024: Bash, Vala, APL
• 2025: C23, C++23
• 2026: Hare

NOTE: Yes; the list above is 35 lines long. I can’t really believe it.

Hare

So yes, this year I dived into Hare, another one of those programming languages that aim to become the “next C”, allowing developers to write fast lower-level code, without… well, writing C. (Insert shrug emoji here.)

Here go some notes I took while diving into the subject, hopefully they’ll be useful to you too.

• Home page.
• Created by Drew DeVault
  • Announcement and another announcement.
• Source code
  • Based on the QBE backend which I didn’t know about.
• Standard library docs

This language has been around since 2022, so there’s already quite a few “first impressions” out there, that I recommend you read, too:

• Quite a long (1 hour 40 minutes!) recording of a streaming session with an introduction to the language (published in 2024).
• First impressions by Dhole
• More impressions
• And some very early impressions (2021) by Kiëd Llaentenn.

Finally, if you would like to see some example code written in Hare, I found the following:

• There’s a “Hare by Example” website.
• An operating system built with it, because why not.

In my own experiment, I literally gave Cursor the whole Conway project and asked it to translate it to Hare; and lo and behold, it succeeded, with just 3 iterations.

export fn main() void = {
	let w = world_new(30);

	const p1 = blinker(coord { x = 0, y = 1 });
	const p2 = beacon(coord { x = 10, y = 10 });
	const p3 = glider(coord { x = 4, y = 5 });
	const p4 = block(coord { x = 1, y = 10 });
	const p5 = block(coord { x = 18, y = 3 });
	const p6 = tub(coord { x = 6, y = 1 });

	seed(&w, p1[..]);
	seed(&w, p2[..]);
	seed(&w, p3[..]);
	seed(&w, p4[..]);
	seed(&w, p5[..]);
	seed(&w, p6[..]);

	let generation = 0;
	for (true) {
		generation += 1;
		world_print(w, generation);
		time::sleep(500 * time::MILLISECOND);
		w = world_evolve(w);
	};
};

IMPORTANT: Interestingly, of all the “C successor” languages (a select group where Rust and Zig appear as pioneers) Hare is the one that requires the least amount of code to reproduce this application, more or less the same as Java, Dart, or D, while Zig and Rust require slightly longer codebases (25% longer for Zig, 40% longer for Rust) for the same results.

All in all, I found Hare interesting; it is worth exploring it more in the future, although you might infer from the lack of enthusiasm in my writing that there wasn’t really anything special that caught my attention. It’s a commendable and interesting work for sure, but that’s all. (And, yes, I do sometimes expect a bit too much from programming languages, most probably.)

We can solve this step by step as follows. First, eliminate $y$ adding $(1)$ and $(2)$ together:

Eliminate $y$ multiplying equation $(2)$ by $2$ and adding it to equation $(3)$:

Adding this to equation $(3)$ we get:

Solve the $2 \times 2$ system for $x$ and $z$: from equation $(5)$, we can see that $z = 10 - 7x$. Substitute this into equation $(4)$:

Now, find $z$:

Finally, find $y$ using equation 1:

And the final solution is:

Et voilà! This simple algorithm was one of my discoveries of 1989. Then came other methods, including substitution and matrices (aka Cramer’s rule), but traditional calculus (that is, derivatives and integrals) wasn’t a part of the curriculum for the exam.

I tried to connect Boatswain to my Flatpak-installed version of OBS Studio (of which I’ve already talked in a previous article) to simplify its use, and I discovered that the latest versions of OBS Studio use a WebSocket 5-based API, while unfortunately Boatswain only speaks the old OBS Studio API based on WebSocket 4.

The solution consists in installing an older version of the obs-websocket plugin, which thankfully in Flatpak is just a simple command away:

$ flatpak install com.obsproject.Studio.Plugin.WebSocket

Once this is done, just customize your buttons on Boatswain, adding as many OBS-related tasks as you’d like (to start and stop recording or streaming, to switch scenes, or even to mute your audio input) and have fun!

The three albums are, in order of release:

• “The Tumbleweed Connection” by Elton John (1970) (also available on YouTube)
• “Breakfast in America” by Supertramp (1979) (also available on YouTube)
• “The Joshua Tree” by U2 (1987) (again, also available on YouTube)

The three of them convey various degrees of sadness, pity, and admiration for a nation that has collectively chosen to represent the best and the worst of the human race, at the same time, with the same fake smile in their face, and pretending that everything is all right.

The “American Fatigue Syndrome” is real.

We are the privileged witnesses of the downfall of the great empire of the 20th century, in real time. The three artists above, in between notes and chords and arpeggios, were already aware of the mess, 50 years ago, and we didn’t pay attention. That’s what great artists do; they can distill the essence, what the French call “L’Air du Temps”, and bottle it for future generations to understand.

We are those future generations, so I have nothing else to say to you than this: just click “play” on the three of these albums, and listen to the sound made by the inexorable decay of Western civilization.

The entry exams were quite competitive, which is Latin for “difficult”. There were three of them; the first about Maths, the second about Spanish literature (we had to read a recently published novel by Gabriel García Márquez I remember, “El General en su Laberinto”), and a third one about “Cultura General”, a pot-pourri of questions about history, geography, politics, and the arts. We used to meet with a couple of friends at home during that year, preparing questions drawn from previous years’ exams.

Of course the Math exam was the one that everyone feared the most, including me. Yes, I’ve already told the story about how I taught myself calculus in a previous article, but still, there were many subjects in the exam that weren’t part of the standard curriculum, and we had to learn from scratch.

One of those subjects was trigonometry, and thankfully my school offered support to exam candidates like us, to have extracurricular classes during the afternoons (we had standard classes only during mornings those days). These extra classes were taught by a venerable and legendary professor whose family name has vanished from my RAM.

And among the myriad things he taught us during those preparation sessions, we had the eponymous acronym “SOHCAHTOA” engraved in our memory. For those who do not know, it’s a mnemonic rule to remember how to calculate the sinus, cosine, and tangent of an angle, as seen in a rectangular triangle:

• Sine: length of the Opposite side, divided by the length of the Hypotenuse.
• Cosine: length of the Adjacent side, divided by the length of the Hypotenuse.
• Tangent: length of the Opposite side, divided by the length of the Adjacent.

What am I even talking about you say? Well, maybe the image below will help (or refresh your memory):

And look at that: 37 years later… I still remember the rule and its meaning.

In this magazine we marvel at the various strategies that society has used in the past 80 years to explain Computer Science topics to laymen. Bridging C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures, or making the impossible dialog possible, is the explicit obsession of the writer of the lines you are reading now; and this month’s Vidéothèque movies are another such attempt, and brilliant ones at that.

Leila Gharani is a very popular Iranian-Austrian-Canadian podcaster based in Amsterdam, who has become one of the focal points for Excel training and knowledge, with almost 3 million subscribers as the time of this writing. She has specialized in Microsoft Excel for the past decade, occasionally posting content about other productivity applications like PowerPoint, Teams, or even Windows. She has been covering each and every feature and function of Excel in extensive detail for the past decade, targeting business users who are interested in the latest features or in knowing how to optimize their workflows.

Behold the key phrase in the last sentence: “targeting business users”. Her audience is specifically not software engineers, programmers, or computer science majors (although she has published content targeting mechanical engineers), but rather good old users, you know, the members of that unknown species of humans that is actually trying to figure out how to make things with the software we write and publish.

Yes, the ones for whom the word “Currying” is probably something related to food.

So how do you explain lambdas to people? Have you ever tried explaining what you did for a living to your grandparents? This is not a trivial problem; some self-taught developers (like the one you are reading now) have resorted to reading various textbooks, coupled with endless programming sessions until the “coin dropped”. Others might have followed extensive training, both in university or in other contexts, and might have a stronger theoretical background.

In her videos, Ms Gharani speaks to the proverbial user, that someone who need to get stuff done, and her focus is entirely practical. She starts by showing what you can do with lambdas; in her case, cleaning up a long list of data (admittedly, a quite common task prior to being able to analyze such data), and then also in the following analysis phase, ordering items following complex rules.

It is only after showing what you can do with it, that Ms Gharani moves into the actual coding phase. In my opinion, this is an often overlooked approach in programming videos, that many a programming tutor would be wise to follow: if you are going to explain a concept, show it in action first. So that is what she does, in two steps. The first Vidéothèque video of this month features Ms Gharani introducing Excel lambdas to her audience; the second one shows her getting into the slippery topic of recursion.

So what is a lambda for Ms Gharani? She explains it in her own words at minute 04:54 of the first video:

These are just functions that you create. These functions act like machines. Once you’ve created that machine you can put through it other ingredients and reuse it as often as you want.

Simple and to the point. She goes on to show how to create lambdas, without getting into any theory or name-dropping Alonzo Church not even once. Lambdas are functions that create other functions, and yes, she literally performs some function currying in real time on screen (of course she does not say that).

Would this pass for a PhD degree in Computer Science? Are we even formally demonstrating that Excel is Turing-Complete? Of course not, and that is not the point. Her audience is not programmers; it is accountants, financial managers, assistants, associates, and whoever needs to use Excel in a daily basis to solve real-world problems.

Her second video on the subject goes even deeper, dealing with recursion. Now, I do not know about you, but when I was first exposed to recursion (around 1994 during my Turbo Pascal classes at the University of Geneva) I found the concept very, very hard to grasp at first; let alone to debug and to implement.

And I have to be honest; Ms Gharani explained recursion in this video much better than my teacher at the time. Some things are better explained by examples, at least when it comes to my brain.

Watch this month’s Vidéothèque movies, “Excel Lambda - How & when you should use it” and “Excel Recursive Lambda - Create loops with zero coding!”, and “What’s Python in Excel + Do You Really Need it?” by Leila Gharani, on her YouTube channel. Complement these videos with other gems like “Pure Functional Programming in Excel”, a conference talk by Felienne Hermans at GOTO Amsterdam 2016; Kevlin Henney ranting about Microsoft developers adding lambda calculus to Excel during the pandemic; and last but not least, a 2015 interview of Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston by Business Insider.

I vividly remember that Sanyo (or was it a Sharp?) huge digital radio alarm clock next to her bed, one of those with bright green LEDs, which would invariably wake her (and me, sometimes) with the same loud music every morning: the opening credits of “Magdalena Tempranísimo”.

It was a wildly popular morning radio talk show with news, weather, interviews, and political commentary, widely considered today as one of the most important radio shows of all times in Argentina. The host of the show, which aired from 1987 to 2006, was the late Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, and back in the 1980s, it was part of the standard program of Radio Mitre

In particular, one of the memories I have of that show was waking up every rainy morning to the music of the film “Singing in the Rain” when it was raining… or with the voice of Ms Ruiz Guiñazú telling us to “dress like bears” during the short but rather intense porteño winters.

Here’s an anecdote: in 1996, years after we moved to Switzerland, I got my first dial-up internet connection at home, and to demo the power of the Internet to my mother, I pointed my Netscape Navigator browser, bundled with the classic and (at the time) unique RealAudio plugin, to the Radio Mitre website.

I kid you not, fate dictated that at this precise moment, the opening credits of “Magdalena Tempranísimo” would be playing, and of course, my mother got very emotional. We both stayed there listening to the news, in silence, just like a decade earlier in Buenos Aires, with my mother barely believing what was blasting through the speakers of my 486 PC.

If you have plenty of items in your Zotero library, and you need to find those that don’t have at least one tag associated with them, follow these steps:

1. Right-click over “My Library” at the top-left of the navigation tree.
2. Select “New Saved Search”
3. Fill the options as shown in the image below:
   1. Name: Untagged (or any name you’d like)
   2. Search in library: My Library
   3. Match “all” of the following:
      1. “Tag”
      2. “does not contain”
      3. Empty field
4. Click OK

The logic is a bit weird: “all items that don’t contain any tag” does the trick, but in my head that phrase sounds like “all items that contain some tag” (you know, negation of a negation is an affirmation) which would mean that the list should show exactly the opposite… anyway.

I hate negative logic, really. It’s like those checkboxes that read “Disable” instead of “Enable” and you have to think twice before clicking or not.

To a large degree, and I don’t chew my words, Geneva is a shithole and definitely the place in Switzerland that I abhor the most. Maybe the only one, really, because the rest of the country is quite lovely. It’s the only city in Switzerland I don’t recommend to foreigners to visit; actually I literally tell them to avoid it at all costs.

But, as fate would have it, I had to go to Geneva recently for work, and thankfully the project and the team I dealt with were wonderful, because the city itself is an unlivable mess of idiotic proportions. I also got to visit plenty of old friends of mine in the area, so that was lovely too.

The government of Geneva has tried (and succeeded) for the past 30 years (at least) to make Geneva a worse place to live, go shopping, travel, stay, and move around. It is absolutely fucking impossible to like this place.

(And don’t tell me that the problem is the socialist government; Zürich has also a socialist government and is an absolutely fantastic place to live in general.)

The origin story of such a mess has some interesting twists. In the 1960s (this was a story relayed to me by old Genevois who lived that era), Geneva made the conscious decision to privilege cars over public transport. This was notably different to other cities in the country, like Zürich, where public transportation was privileged (or, at the very least, not degraded to second-class citizen).

I moved to Geneva from Buenos Aires in 1991, and at the time the city was an agreeable place to live, even if the amount of cars was quite a problem already. The quality of public transportation was reasonably good (although slow as hell), although after traveling a bit around the country I realized that other cities had it much better.

One of the things I remember that shocked me about Geneva and its relationship with public transportation was this: there was a massive parking next to the offices of the TPG (I don’t remember if it was at Bachet-de-Pesay or Carouge). That meant a simple thing: many (if not most) of those in charge of public transport in Geneva… did not use public transport. Think about that.

(Yes, I understand that bus and tram drivers need to go back home easily, particularly when they finish their shifts at 01:00 in the morning. I’m talking about all the other people, particularly those designing the system for others to use.)

Fast-forward to 1994, and Geneva decided that it needed more tramways. Thus started the nightmare for the inhabitants of the city, whereby for the following years streets became a construction site of gargantuan proportions.

But even worse than the degradation of the quality of life for the Genevois was the philosophy behind this initiative: quite literally, one of the founding philosophies of the transport system in Geneva consists in a so-called “cohabitation” (allow me to laugh a little before continuing) between buses and trams and cars and bikes.

Let us be very clear: there is no possible “cohabitation” between cars and anything else. Cars have taken Geneva hostage, public transportation is a joke (really? You call a rate of one bus per hour a “reasonable service”?) and entire swathes of the city unaccessible to pedestrians or even bikes, with infrastructure only dedicated and usable to cars, cars, and more cars.

What one can find in the streets of Geneva is nothing else but noise, unruly and stressed drivers yelling at each other, literal buses and trams stopped in between rows of cars at rush hour, and an overly unpleasant and pervasive smog that is slowly making everyone angry, ill, or both at the same time.

This tramway fever has not stopped, and I had the bad idea of finding an apartment (to stay at for the duration of the project) in the neighborhood of Grand-Saconnex (yes, next to the Petit-Saconnex I talked about previously), a neighborhood about to become the next victim of this flawed “modernization” project. Apparently in a few years time there will be yet another tram line going through that place. Hopefully.

The Grand-Saconnex also hosts a novelty I discovered during my stay: a literal tunnel that injects traffic from the vicinity of Ferney-Voltaire right into the neighborhood of the international organizations. Of course! Instead of reducing the numbers of cars in the city, let’s make a tunnel so that more cars can enter the city. That’s exactly what you need.

The morons in charge of traffic in Geneva have long ago decided that buses had to travel at 20 km/h, while cars can rush inside a tunnel towards downtown at 60. The same bus trip, from the Grand-Saconnex to Plainpalais, used to take me 30 minutes in 1995 (to go from home to university), but it took me one hour to complete in November 2025.

Slow clap.

In the meantime, Buenos Aires created this thing called Metrobus, and I was astonished to realize that what used to be a one-hour trip back in the 1980s can now be completed in half an hour. The trick? Separate lanes, preferred traffic lights, and faster speed limits.

So here’s my recommendation. If you have never visited Switzerland, avoid Geneva. Actually, you know what, avoid Geneva Airport altogether as well. It is shit and believe me, I know what I’m talking about. Just land in Zürich Airport and you’ll thank me later. (I don’t have a recommendation to the Genevois reading this other than moving out of the city.)

I’ve already linked to this short segment with Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman raving about the Fernando, the national drink of Argentina. In the same occasion, I mentioned Liam Gallagher raving about Argentina and some other celebrities like Will Smith and Ozzy Osbourne.

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But there’s many more reels showcasing raving celebrities: to name a few, and focusing on musicians, we have Mötley Crüe, Megadeth, Guns N’ Roses, Queen, and even Coldplay playing live a famous Argentine rock song, “De Música Ligera”, written by the legendary band Soda Stereo.

Understandably enough, upon hearing the first notes of this classic, the audience gave a new meaning to the word “wild”.

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