Digital Mark

Joke’s on them, I’ve never been “well rested” in my life or my digital afterlife.

It’s still a surviving working copy. “I” go away and reboot every time I fall asleep.

I have two.

Scheme. It’s a fantastic language, you can cleanly switch from functional, procedural, or weird time machines (macros & continuations) solutions to any problem. Most Schemes (esp. Chez, CHICKEN, Gambit, Gerbil) compile to very fast binaries, close enough to C even with dynamic typing and garbage collection. C FFI depends on impl, but usually it’s pretty simple; in CHICKEN you can just write inline C code. SRFI vary from essential libraries to angels-on-pinheads nonsense, but there’s something to pick from.

Down side is the fractured, infighting community. R6RS was a practical batteries-included spec, which pissed off the teaching-only fans, so they made an inferior R7RS, and now committees are trying to make R7RS-large which is just bad R6RS. But if you pick one, and mostly stick to the spec language, it’s not a problem for the developer.

BASIC. I know, ridiculous, right? And I mean line-numbered, Atari or TRS-80 BASIC. But there was never a better language for teaching programming, or for banging out a small interactive program. Turn on any 8-bit computer (or start an emulator), it prompts READY, and you can write something small & interesting. Your modern 64-bit giant machine is not READY.

If they had “fixed” it, there would be a “My Computer” icon. No such thing exists, go TRY the Infinite Mac I linked above.

Yes your uncle who works at Nintendo ^W Apple told you about it.

No such demo happened. They unveiled the 128K with that System 1.0 on stage at a special event. The Lisa has a different UI, but also can’t do what’s described.

This story is a lie.

There’s no “computer icon”. Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system files… which are locked and can’t be deleted.

You can test this yourself on Infinite Mac

There’s other, more verbose, regular expression languages, for instance SRFI-115 for Scheme. But the hard part isn’t the syntax, but actually thinking about patterns, so it won’t help you any.

Just get the O’Reilly bat book and learn. So what if it overwrites 10% of your brain and you can’t remember your mother’s face, you’ll have a useful skill.

I often had to poke around inside Atom to see what it was really doing, what some bug was, and to figure out how to write or configure extensions. I don’t as often do that with Vim, but it’s pretty clean C.

Do you not look inside the overly complex tools you use, especially beta ones? The whole appeal of “open source”/“free software” etc. is you can read the code. But if it’s in something you can’t stand, that’s a disadvantage.

I liked Atom, performance was tolerable on my overpowered machine, but MS killing it just sent me back to Vim and modernizing my plugins.

Zed positives: Metal rendering. I use a Mac, so one platform’s fine. But negatives: Rust, so I can’t/won’t touch any internals, and I loathe the Rustacean propaganda wing. No extensions yet. Config is another stupid json file.

You know what’s great about vimrc? It’s easy to put in a few config commands, and then you realize you’re working in the scripting language. You don’t have to switch to a whole new file format. Thanks, Bram.

It’s clearly secondary to correctness: A program that is well-written but doesn’t work right is worthless. Many hairy balls of mud have shipped to great acclaim.

Human readability & comprehension is nice for maintenance, but you don’t get to maintain something that never worked right to begin with.

… Of course, Windows is existence proof that you can be successful with neither.

Every morning since Feb 2 started, I hear “I Got You, Babe” on the radio. I dunno if it’ll ever change. I don’t even like Sonny & Cher.

Not really. A good code editor has:

1. Editing.
2. Syntax highlighting, paren matching.
3. Filters - basic functions like sort, up to your own scripts.
4. Build/send to REPL.

ed doesn’t have highlighting, but it’s perfectly useful. Notepad’s basically useless, you can’t highlight or filter, can’t build. Vim does 1-3, and then you just type :!make or whatever.

A Taste of Armageddon

Captain James T. Kirk : All right. It’s instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes. Knowing that we won’t kill today. Contact Vendikar. I think you’ll find that they’re just as terrified, appalled, horrified as you are, that they’ll do anything to avoid the alternative I’ve given you. Peace or utter destruction. It’s up to you.

You can do anything at Zombo com

I was using the Internet before the WWW, and there was already a pretty good ecosystem from nerdy stuff to consumer-usable. Email, Usenet, Gopher, FTP, IRC, were all widely usable.

Gopher especially made a great way to index and search (with WAIS) things on multiple different services, without being a mess of text/hyperlinks/images/sound/video in a hairy ball like the WWW.

Scheme, and work through SICP, watch the lectures along with the reading.

I prefer Chez Scheme but there’s many implementations. Chez’s fast and practical, C FFI, large standard library, nice REPL with editor.

Night on Earth (1991), taxi drivers & passengers meet temporarily. Nobody’s happy.

Audio is typical of every other problem on Linux, that’s just the straw that broke my camel’s back.

It’s just half-assed or less at anything, and never gets better.

About 20 years ago, I was trying to get audio playing to stay stable, and have audible alarms from KCal. I did everything, recompiled kernels, nothing fixed it.

So I went out and got a G4 Mac mini, set it up with my audio and it worked perfectly. Within a week I’d shut off the Linux trash for good. Mac OS X does everything better.

For servers, I use FreeBSD, it’s dumb to run Linux there, too.

Nothing’s improved, I have the same audio problems on my RasPi in Linux. Linux is bad at just about everything, any other OS or possibly just a dead badger will do the job better.