I used Borland Delphi (as well as C++ Builder for some period) throughout my university times for all kinds of home works and hobby apps. It was extremely easy to build simple but still good-looking UIs. At some point I even had a small reusable library for graph problems (add/edit nodes/edges with nice arrows/labels etc.) What I really liked was how fast you could get to real coding part with minimum boilerplate. Happy to see Lazarus IDE still having a strong community.
Given how old is Turing's paper and how much it was 'dissected' for the book, I would ask the following:
* Any other top papers that inspired Charles (or he found them worthy of serious deep dive)?
* Does he still read modern papers?
The latter is particularly interesting. I don't have academic background, but some of the people I spoke to claimed that there's lots of subpar papers produced nowadays. Obviously, amount produced in every field significantly increased lately, so it would be interesting to learn how someone with decades of experience is able to filter that out.
Sounds amazing. Big fan of his writing style, have two of his books: "Code" and "The Annotated Turing".
I'd be curious to learn about his work habits - have they changed over the years? Has he experienced any procrastination during his career and how he dealt with it? Any advice to those who got bored by the challenges of the modern software industry?
There's Lazarus project (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/) - which is a Delphi compatible IDE. I've used it once to build a simple UI app, and it was a real nostalgic look back in time. Not to mention that it was extremely simple to build the app.
Norton Commander - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander. Not sure how elegant on the inside, but it comes from the era when software development was not so fast paced. And the fact that it inspired so many spin-offs (just to mention few that I personally used: Volkov Commander, Midnight Commander, FAR Manager, and my favourite - DOS Navigator (it had spreadsheet!)).
If it is a killer feature, and that's a marketing move - why not. Looks like that Firefox been working hard lately to change trends in browsers' market share.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
This one's for you if you want to learn or just recap principles of computers (and read on evolution as well). I just started reading it and found it suprisingly easy to follow. It's perfect if you like things explained step-by-step and in a simple way.
I recommend making it clear that the currency is HKD. Otherwise I was under impression that it costs 170 USD until I went to checkout to see "Total HKD $170.00".
I remember seeing this when it just started (like two years ago, not sure if it was one of those 12 startups/year). Current one looks fantastic compared to that one, so I guess it's one more example that demonstrates you shouldn't hold off until it's feature-rich eye-catching candy. Your project story is inspiring!