Loper should not be considered truly dead until I myself am dead and buried. Currently available computing systems are brain-damaged in such wholesale, unmitigable ways that I am driven back to the project again and again, despite the oceanic size and nearly certain futility of the task. Working full time and being back in school (in a field unrelated to computing) have slowed my Loper work to a crawl. Yet I try to use my scarce free moments to think - and most of the work which must be done here will consist of thinking, rather than coding.  This is because my ultimate aim is to drain the complexity swamp in which programmers have drowned. At any rate, the project should be considered a failure if the alpha version exceeds, say, 20,000 lines of code.

   Important conceptual progress has been made by others. In particular, there now exists a working experimental operating system, "LoseTheOS", which, among other virtues,

• was written from scratch
• tailored to the AMD-64 architecture
• does away with most aspects of the compile/pray/debug cycle
• does away with the programs-as-ascii-globs dogma
• is in the public domain.

I fully intend to build on this progress and learn whatever lessons there are to be learned from this masterpiece.

  Mencius Moldbug of Unqualified Reservations once remarked in his criticism of Haskell and other products of modern academia that most programming "on the ground" consists of juggling database queries. If, as I suspect, this claim is even partly true, this fact alone proves that most programming is entirely unnecessary and that the livelihood of most programmers is quite like that of the glassmaker in the Parable of the Broken Window.

The bootloader is complete, as previously announced. Where to now?

• Initialization of 64-bit memory management data structures
• Basic display driver for QEMU, Bochs, and VMWare virtual SVGA cards
• PIO disk access driver
• And, of course, the Loper Lisp JIT compiler. "First, steal a chicken..."

Expect more in the near future.