The Art of the Interpreter (1978) [pdf]
It&#x27;s interesting how nobody&#x27;s responded or engaged with this, the post is 3 hours old with 0 comments, there&#x27;s another post currently on the frontpage that&#x27;s 1 hour old with 38 comments.<p>When PG set this place up he didn&#x27;t want it filled up with political material, or things you could find elsewhere in other tech-specific news sites.<p>But at the end of the day, those are the things most users on here can understand, after the five years of reading this site, the average person on here comes off as trying to sound superior, but the only topics they consistently engage with are the ones that are accessible to anyone, without needing to know the subject matter. You can have an opinion on abortion without reading any political theory on it, and indeed most people won&#x27;t, just like you can have an opinion on style notation (which is what the other article is about, incidentally).<p>Things like &quot;Understanding and writing a JPEG decoder in Python&quot; (5 hours ago, 13 comments) or &quot;The Floppy Disk of Floating Point&quot; (10 hours ago, 75 comments), will naturally see less interaction than articles like &quot;TikTok Agreed to Buy More Than $800M in Cloud Services from Google&quot; (6 hours ago, 147 comments) or &quot;German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving&quot; (11 hours ago, 474 comments). Simply because they&#x27;re technically-driven articles, not something you would see on a regular tabloid. And as the userbase of this site has shot up, the interests of the people here has grown more homogenised and mainstream.<p>It&#x27;s difficult to have an opinion on this PDF, or interpreters in general, if you haven&#x27;t actually read the content, so most people will not engage with it. Even though it&#x27;s more informative than the political things that show up on this site. Even though it&#x27;s more unique.<p>Don&#x27;t misunderstand me, most of it is just time cost. But a fair amount of it is just lack of willingness, lack of willingness to engage with material that takes more than a second to process, that you can&#x27;t memoize a viewpoint on, something you have to read properly to understand the content.<p>It&#x27;s sad, but it&#x27;s human.