The ML family is one of the most influential yet consistently misunderstood lineages in programming language history. OCaml stands at the center of this tradition as a rare example of a language that preserved conceptual clarity while evolving toward real world practicality. Many modern languages borrow from ML without acknowledging the source. Others attempt reinvention and rediscover solutions ML had decades earlier.
After I published my earlier essay titled The Decade We Forgot: How We Traded Intimacy for Scale a reader asked whether it is still practical to foster introspection at scale or whether the economic barrier has become too high to overcome. This article is a direct continuation of that piece. It expands the discussion to tooling, hardware, infrastructure, organisational culture, AI systems and economic incentives. The goal is to show that we can still build machines we understand. My answer is that yes, introspection remains possible at scale, but only if we recognise how many dimensions it touches and act accordingly.
The old internet felt special because it was small. The early web was shaped by hobbyists and enthusiasts who built communities that were small enough to feel human. This feeling faded not because of nostalgia or technology but because the internet grew larger than the communities that once defined it. These communities were overshadowed by platforms built for scale but they continue to exist underneath the noise.
Many developers want the clarity and control that comes from designing a language around a custom virtual machine, but they do not want to ship a heavy runtime, a slow interpreter, or a dependency that resembles Java or the .NET framework. A language can use a virtual machine internally while still producing very small native binaries. The VM becomes the semantic core, not a component that must be delivered to the end user. This article explains how such a system can be designed, how to structure the toolchain, and how to keep native executables small and portable.
Introduction Modern programming languages keep repeating a mistake that goes all the way back to the 1950s: they force you to commit to one syntax. The moment you choose a language, you inherit not only its semantics and features, but also its aesthetic, its indentation rules, its punctuation rituals, and all the historical debt that came with its design.
Introduction Programming languages are supposed to evolve, but most of the time they “revolve”. Every “new” language borrows the brilliance of its ancestors and adds new layers of safety, syntax, or ideology. Yet somehow, the more we add, the less complete the result becomes.
Preface: Why Genera Still Matters Genera is a Lisp-based operating system and development environment originally built for Symbolics Lisp Machines in the 1980s and later ported to run in a virtual machine as Open Genera and, more recently, Portable Genera.
When Inferior Languages Won Lisp was light years ahead: symbolic, self aware, and alive. C was simple, brittle, and close to the metal. Yet C won.
Not because it was better, but because the world changed its definition of better.
The Decade We Forgot There was a moment somewhere between 1988 and 1998 when computing stopped feeling alive.
We did not notice it at first. The screens grew sharper, the CPUs faster, the GUIs prettier. But something subtle and essential faded: the idea that a computer was knowable.
The New Machine If the 1980s taught us what computing could have been, and the 2000s taught us what it became, then the 2030s might be our chance to build something alive again.
Reclaiming the Machine After studying the Lost Wonders of Computing, it is tempting to grieve but grief is not the point. The point is reclamation.
Many of those ancient ideas are not gone; they are simply fragmented across modern systems. We can rebuild a living, introspective, personal machine again by design.
Lost Wonders of Computing When I look back at the languages and systems of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, I don’t just see “old tech”. I see entire worlds of thought, ideas that modern computing quietly abandoned.
Over these five days I transformed my workflow. I learned how to manage time and notes with Org-agenda, linked my journal to Org-roam, wrote admin scripts, fell into the VPN transparency rabbit hole, considered building my own mail server, and wrestled with the absurd verification hurdles of modern social media. By the end of the week, I had a working Hugo blog fully integrated with Emacs keybindings and a deeper appreciation for how messy, funny, and rewarding the digital world can be when you insist on doing things your own way.
After several rounds of installing, breaking, and nuking both Emacs and Doom Emacs, I somehow ended up learning Vim, Lisp jokes, and the art of starting from scratch. Between building configs, experimenting with Org-mode for everything, and testing games on Linux (which surprisingly ran better than Windows), I spent more time tweaking than doing—but I’m finally starting to understand how it all fits together. Pain, parentheses, and progress.
The Process of Discovery While I am still working on my method of delivery, what I hope those articles will give the readers, is to show all the benefits of alternative working environments that they might not be aware of and the process of learning all of it. Instead of making me look like an expert who makes no mistakes, I want to show how a true process of learning looks like, even for someone who is already experienced with technology.
Nuked Windows, embraced chaos, and installed Arch (twice). Learned that “manual install” means “pain”, discovered archinstall is the real hero, fought UEFI demons, and achieved enlightenment through Btrfs, Wayland, and two reinstallations. Now running a minimal desktop with maximum trauma and a newfound sense of superiority.
This isn’t just another “I switched to Linux” story.
It’s a journey. It’s a documentation of my slow descent into madness a slow, glorious descent into terminal dependency.
A story I want to document. A record of confusion, discovery, frustration, and small victories.
