You could do the same in reverse as well. Many of the features listed in the first paragraph existed before in other languages, though probably not all of them in a single language. In fact, I believe the design process (sensibly) favored best practices of existing languages rather than completely new and unproven mechanisms.
So there was considerable borrowing from PASCAL, CLU, MODULA(-2), CSP. It's possible that the elaborate system for specifying machine representations of numbers was truly novel, but I'm not sure how much of a success that was.
There are features common to Ada and Modula, but those have been taken by both languages from Xerox Mesa.
The first version of Modula was designed with the explicit goal of making a simple small language that provided a part of the features of Xerox Mesa (including modules), after Wirth had spent a sabbatical year at Xerox.
Nowadays Modula and its descendants are better known than Mesa, because Wirth and others have written some good books about it and because Modula-2 was briefly widely available for some microcomputers. Many decades ago, I had a pair of UVPROM memories (i.e. for a 16-bit data bus) that contained a Modula-2 compiler for Motorola MC68000 CPUs, so I could use a computer with such a CPU for programming in Modula-2 in the same manner how many early PCs could be used with their built-in BASIC interpreter. However, after switching to an IBM PC/AT compatible PC, I have not used the language again.
However, Xerox Mesa was a much superior language and its importance in the history of programming languages is much greater than that of Modula and its derivatives.
Ada has taken a few features from Pascal, but while those features were first implemented in Pascal, they had been proposed much earlier by others, e.g. the enumerated types of Pascal and Ada had been first proposed by Hoare in 1965.
When CLU is mentioned, usually Alphard must also be mentioned, as those were 2 quasi-simultaneous projects at different universities that had the purpose of developing programming languages with abstract data types. Many features have appeared first in one of those languages and then they have been introduced in the other after a short delay. Among the features of modern programming languages that come from CLU and Alphard are for-each loops and iterators.
Mesa was my first language that I used out of Collage for the seven years that I worked on the Xerox Star document editor. The job where I learned more in 6 months than I did in 4 years of collage or my entire working career afterwords.
It was by far the best language that I used for my entire working career where I had to endure such languages as PL/1 (and PL/S), C, C++, Java, JavaScript and PHP. While Java as a lang was not too bad it still paled in features and usability compared to MESA and it too was influenced by MESA.
But as was true at Xerox was it was the complete network that was revolutionary at the time in the early 80’s. The fact that I could source debug any machine remotely on the corporate would wide network of over 5000 machine and that the source code would be automatically done loaded to my machine (mean I could easily debug from any nearby random machine) was just something I could never “easily’ do elsewhere.
MESA was missing a few things (which CEDAR solved and used generally within only Xerox PARC partially because at the time it really only ran on Dorado class machine) such as Garbage collection and in the case of Star it would have been much better if the language supported OOP. For Star we had had a system called Traits to support objects but it had some serious issues IMHO (which would be fodder for a separate post.)
When talking about Mesa you also need to talk about Tajo, its development environment built onto- of the OS Pilot (Star also used Pilot.) But systems also supported a mouse and a large bitmapped monitor and had overlapping windows (although most of Star have automatic non overlapping windows that was a UI usability decision.)
There is also more because the network was very important. Print severs, file servers, mail servers, cloudless store for all of Star’s user files/desktop. All this in the very early 80’s was unheard of elsewhere. It’s very similarly to what Steve Jobs missed when he saw Smalltalk where he only really saw a new UI and missed much more that was demoed.
It was a magic place to work at the time, I had left in the very late 80s for Apple and it was a huge step backwards at the time (but did amazing stuff with their limited tools but made working not fun.)
Some information may also exist in other subdirectories of "pdf/xerox".
There have been many references to Mesa in the research articles and the books published towards the end of the seventies and during the eighties, but those are hard to find today, as most of them may have not been digitized. Even if they were digitized, it is hard to search through them to find the relevant documents, because you would not know from the title whether Mesa is also discussed along with other programming languages.
In general, bitsavers.org is probably the most useful Internet resource about old computing hardware and software, because no secondary literature matches the original manuals of the computer vendors, which in the distant past had an excellent quality, unlike today.
Ada provides many features of Mesa, but not all of them and I regret that some Mesa features are missing from the languages that are popular today.
The loops with double exits of Python (i.e. with "else") have been inspired by Mesa, but they provide only a small subset of the features available in Mesa loops.
I would argue the opposite: Being describable in BNF is exactly the hallmark of sensible syntax in a language, and of a language easily amenable to recursive descent parsing. Wirth routinely published (E)BNF for the languages he designed.
Quarterly earnings will be released April 22. My impression is that in recent years, such rumors tended to cluster around earnings reports (which largely haven't been great the last 2 years or so), presumably as distractions.
They don’t really need this though, every TSLA investor already louds that TSLA is not a car company - I think now it is no longer “Robo”taxi company either but humanoids-data-center-on-Jupiter-moon-mining company. Hence, absolutely no need for any EV announcements :)
The way I remember it is that I used at least Lycos and AltaVista before Google. In both cases, a major reason for switching was that the search itself got cluttered up with ads.
So Google's current trajectory does not bode well for them, as far as I'm concerned.
It's sort of ironic that at the time, there were many complaints that Apple made its devices thin at the expense of more important features. Now that M series MacBooks are thicker again, there are complaints that they are too thick.
I owned an i9 MBP with a discrete GPU. It absolutely was too thin. The CPU and GPU ran hot, it throttled like crazy. It would drain battery while USB-C docked while idling. Worst laptop I've ever owned.
The M1 Max I replaced it with was the opposite. I don't think I heard the fans for the first month. But it was much larger.
Based on the fanless Air, I strongly suspect an M1 Max in the old chassis would have been totally fine for non synthetic workloads and an M1 Pro would probably have been fine in all scenarios.
But I think they over corrected on the chassis design when they were shipping borderline faulty products and haven't walked it back yet.
I speculate they gave themselves a lot of thermal engineering margin to bump up TDP with the M-series MBP design (or perhaps they underestimated how good the M-series chips were going to be) The battery being at the TSA limit of 100Wh is quite nice as well. Another benefit is that it now differentiates the "Pro" line from the rest of the laptop lineup quite significantly. For most people the Air has enough power now and its plenty thin and light. The pro line is for "true" pros with actually intense workflows.
I'm a dev and the MBP line is definitely overkill for me. The 15" MBA handles everything I can throw at it.
To me, the speech sounds impressively expressive, but there is something off about the audio quality that I can't quite put my finger on.
The "Anger Speech" has an obvious lisp (Maybe a homage to Elmer Fudd?). But I hear a similar, but more subtle, speech impediment in the "Adoration Speech". The "Fearful Speech" might have a slight warble to it. And the "Long Speech" is difficult to evaluate because the speaker has vocal fry to an extent that I find annoying.
There's a subtle modulation that happens on all of the samples. It sounds almost like some kind of harmonic or phase shift? This is something I notice with every AI generated speech out there.
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