In an industry that is notoriously behind the times, a fundamental change is underway. This change is in response to new business demands, including: (1) The desire to price increasingly complex deals with increasingly large datasets; (2) The desire to integrate with 3rd party data to augment pricing models; (3) The desire for faster models and robust codebases that adhere to software development best practices. Excel fails miserably at these tasks. — Ditching Excel for Python – Lessons Learned from a Legacy Industry
There are definitely disadvantages to use text streams as the universal interface between programs due to its lack of structure. But the timelessness of many of the programs following this pattern and the prosperity that it brings to the CLI ecosystem proved its effectiveness as a design choice. Text can be read by both human and programs. It can be manipulated, printed, stored, trasferred, version controlled with the tools of your choice. For programs that do not inheritantly require structured data, using text streams as interface provides the most flexibility and composibility. — Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface
2021-01-02: Nice series on Python: Python behind the scenes. #python
2021-01-02: 7 versatile Vim commands that are easy to memorize. #vim
2021-01-02: Some things a potential Git replacement probably needs to provide. #git
2021-01-04: A loosely-categorized collection of links to CS textbooks in a variety of areas that are freely available online.
2021-01-04: My year in data.
2021-01-04: Why Clojure?
2021-01-06: Static Executables with SBCL. #lisp
2021-01-06: What I Use Now Instead Of Google.
2021-01-07: Trying out Byobu. Not sure it works best compared to my Kitty + Tmux settings, since it becomes hard to manage a Byobu session on a remote machine from a currently running Byobu terminal. However, when using Kitty as the driving terminal, I get all the Byobu goodies on the remote server.
2021-01-08: Some useful tips on Lisp debugging. #lisp
2021-01-08: Colour schemes and templates, by Paul Tol.
2021-01-08: How to open a file in Emacs. #emacs
2021-01-12: Generic interfaces in Racket. #scheme
2021-01-12: Python instead of Lisp. #lisp
2021-01-12: Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator.
2021-01-12: Rob Warnock Lisp usenet archive. #lisp
2021-01-13: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read. Feeling older and older…
2021-01-13: Distributing Mac apps outside the App Store, a quick start guide. #apple
2021-01-13: Typographic Email Kitchen Sink.
2021-01-15: I gave up with calcurse to manage my TODOs and agenda. I’m probably not an agenda’s guy. However, I added cmus to my TUI toolbelt and it’s now my default music player. If only the Latitude 7310 had a better built-in sound system.
2021-01-15: A Week With Plan 9.
2021-01-15: A rabbit hole full of Lisp. #emacs
2021-01-15: MacOS in Virtualbox. It just works. It would sound weird to install macOS on top of Ubuntu, but I appreciate that the author stays at Mojave, which is probably the latest version of macOS in line with OS X’s original spirit.
2021-01-17: What you need on Sunday evening when you’re looking for a specific file in your “Papers” directory:
alias bibfind="bibtex-ls ~/org/references.bib
\| fzf --multi --ansi
\| rg -o --color never '[a-z0-9\-]+$'
\| xargs -I % sh -c 'fdfind % ~/Documents/papers'
\| xargs -I % sh -c 'xdg-open %'
Note that this requires fzf-bibtex, rg and fd, but the later two can easily be replaced with the standard ̀grep and find tools.
It’s hard to contest that Neovim’s achievement happened because of its approachable development process focused on maintainability and velocity, while in contrast, it could be argued that current progress in Emacs happens despite its development process. (and a bunch of other very good points in this article) — The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
2021-01-18: Typesetting automation.
2021-01-18: Unix as IDE. See also the ebook version.
2021-01-19: I already have all my emails on my laptop since several years. I am about to transfer more than1500 MP3 files to my Music library. Next step: Get back all my hi-res photos from the cloud.
2021-01-22:
The thing that comes through in the interview is that Knuth is dedicated to bringing the same joy he finds in the material to others. He structures his prose to keep the reader turning the page. Then, of course, there’s his fanatical commitment to making his printed works look good. — Knuth on Writing
2021-01-25: Quickly open a terminal in Neovim (much like pop-up term in Doom Emacs)::5sp +te
2021-01-25: The Piecewise Geometric Model index (PGM-index) is a data structure that enables fast lookup, predecessor, range searches and updates in arrays of billions of items using orders of magnitude less space than traditional indexes while providing the same worst-case query time guarantees.
2021-01-25: ffscreencast is a shell wrapper for ffmpeg that allows fool-proof screen recording via the command line.
2021-01-26: Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2020 edition.