https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-google-judge-william-alsup-interview-waymo-uber this is an absolutely wild article

The judge sat me down on the sofa and walked me through his programs on a 2011 court-issued Dell laptop. He couldn’t run the same programs on his desktop computer, he said with some irritation, so the Dell was here to stay. “It’s the last one that will support QuickBASIC, which is kind of a shame, because it’s the only language I really know.”

...

I asked him if I could put his code on GitHub, and he asked me what GitHub was. In lieu of that, he handed me printouts of his computer programs, three stacks of paper that had been neatly stapled at the corners. The one on the top, he apologized, had several dependencies that he hadn’t had the time to print out. Long before he became the judge presiding over Silicon Valley, Alsup had been a hobbyist operating in isolation; he’s a geek, but he’s a geek from another era.

I feel like this is the perfect guy for the job. He understands all the core technical concepts without being bogged down by the trends, hype, and influence of modern tech society. This allows him to be impartial without being ignorant. The last thing I want is a Judge who spends too much time on Hacker News or Reddit...

Alas, it is not he who is deciding the case. He already did, but then it went to a higher court.

Indeed, The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case this time around. It's going to be a landmark case either way: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/07/921018204/google-and-oracles-decade-long-copyright-battle-reaches-supreme-court

Always fascinating to see what conventions smart people outside of programmer culture end up adopting.