obscure TIOBE contestants

 Today's fun was going through TIOBE and drilling into highly-ranked but otherwise obscure contestants :

* (a) => "apparently"

• #10 Delphi / Object Pascal
  : some blokes in Europe have been implementing business software on it : 6,000 SMBs consume this (a)
• #11 Scratch
  : 100 million children use it, under the MIT Media Lab (a)
• #22 Prolog
  : used in academia to teach Logic Programming (a) : so its current prominence was news to me ... in theory all it does is roll certain algorithms under the hood, so that the entire language is branded as a Logic Programming language ... its runtime implementations are not particularly fast otherwise, and the syntax has descended to Erlang which is a much more industrialised language with robust implementations. I was wondering if the AI majors are popularising this, but they are not (a)
• #44 X++
  : another B2B language, once from IBM, now under MSFT (a)
• #46 GML
  : a gaming company's community language
• #47 LabVIEW
  :  used heavily in engineering draughting, a graphical programming language (a) 
• #49 Solidity
  : oh, crypto! Ethereum!
• #50 Visual FoxPro
  : another SMB systems legacy language (a)

-- HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE -- the following were not alien to me, but might be to others

• #17 MATLAB
  : legacy commercialised linear algebra software from the 80s
• #20 Ada
  : US defense industry stalwart ( mandate removed in 1997 )
• #24 Kotlin
  : a modern general purpose language for the JVM, and the second most popular
• #25 SAS
  : ancient statistical programming language from the 70s, with a commercia legacy
• #33 ML
  : predecessor of ML, a bit of an ecosystem uncle

reflections on the endocrinology of study

Perhaps I have too much trauma from past learnings. Like, childhood learnings, before I started self-guided studies at 18. Often enough I run into a list of things I don't know, and I become afraid. Then I recollect myself and procrastinate before finally getting to the study. The study is usually easier than anticipated.

But this is a bit of an oversimplification. Based on my biased view of my own track record, my normal acceptance for stress is something like "75% of the time unsuccessful, with accompanying hormonal and neural responses", and "25% successful, ditto". Which is to say, I spend most of my life depressed, and make up for it more than adequately otherwise.

Then I reflect on the sort of people I think are foolish, who seem to spend the majority of their time talking about success, but then have these minority periods of time when they are depressed. But after all, the averages are equivalent, I suppose. So it is just a preference about how one wishes to spend time.

Throwback : COPR

AI devs and cog-sci nerds : Kant's [ Critique of Pure Reason ] ! It's a 1781 AD European classic, on how to to quantify consciousness. No shit. Very relevant in 2026.

A dude on Threads referenced this classical text while objecting to something I wrote. I went back to check on terminology. It's been a while since I had to read CoPR in college - five years after I had gotten the summary of TI from Sophie's World. 

Here I highlight an important treatment of Kant's vocabulary : when he says "intuition" he's referring roughly to "dumb sensations" not to some intangible/ insensible thing.

Have fun reading CoPR if you can! Maybe get an abridged copy, or the AI summary will do. One of my two branches of college-era R&D was about this stuff, and that has continued into my work post-college : I'm still trying to learn how to talk to computers :P