Lambda

I believe it stands for Free/Libre Open Source Software. I think the idea is to explicitly indicate both free as in beer and free as in speech. However, to me it just sounds like throwing in a romance term for the sake of it. But maybe I’m just ill versed on the whole free/libre divide?

Sadly front end, like “High Level” is a very relative term. For example, in compiler design, the bit that parses code is called the “front end” since the “back end” is what emits machine code. I think that’s what they mean here, the “front end” that understands D3D8 code has been added, presumably there is also a “back end” that converts the parsed/analyzed D3D8 code into valid opcodes for consumption by GPU/CPUs.

In the other direction, a UI/UX is sometimes called a “back end” when it is part of a more complex embedded project where physical controls are the “front end”.

I still use Ada daily for my personal projects after having used it at work. I find it compliments my thinking patterns well. My only gripe with it is that they ate too much of their own dog food at AdaCore and now it can be hard to install Ada and gprbuild (due to a circular dependency). Plus gprc stole libgpr and broke some stuff too.

More specifically look up the term “ablaut reduplication”. There’s lots of great articles and honestly some pretty good YouTube videos on the subject. I’m honestly surprised how great the YouTube linguistics scene is, from Tom Scott’s language files to rob words and name explain (plus nativlang). Hours of infotainment on linguistics for those interested!

Wait until you learn about the shell specific /dev “files” like /dev/udp and /dev/tcp (which can send/recv IP traffic as if from a file)!