But the language landscape has changed a lot since then, and realistically no programmer today cares about what made a language stand out 50 years ago. Clearly, the good ideas have been copied into other languages. Paul Graham even suggests this convergence towards Lisp is inevitable. I wouldn’t go so far. But this begs the question: Is there anything left? Are there any features that couldn’t be copied so easily into the various descendants of Algol? — What Are the Enduring Innovations of Lisp?
The idea is that if I found it confusing, lots of other people probably did too, even though the information might theoretically be out there on the internet somewhere. Just because there is information on the internet, it doesn’t get magically teleported into people’s brains! — Some blogging myths
2023-06-06: Reduce vs fold in Common Lisp: Interestingly, R whihc is often referred to as a Scheme-like language has Reduce as one of its higher-order function, but no fold[lr] functions in base. Modeling Data With Functional Programming in R (whole book available in 2024 maybe?) looks like an interesting take on this topic. #rstats #lisp
2023-06-12:
Your true audience (those who care) is about 1% of your subscribers. 1000 followers on Twitter?> Your audience is 10 people. 10000 email subscribers? 100 people. — Blogging Myths You Should Care About
2023-06-12: ♪ Johanna Warren · I’d Be Orange
2023-06-15:
In my view this isn’t about adhering to the XDG standard[3], it’s about getting things out of
$HOME. Unix dotfiles were always a (somewhat accidental) hack[4], and over the years we’ve accumulated entirely too many of them in our$HOMEs. The XDG option isn’t particularly perfect, but it’s at least a standard approach and it achieves the goal of getting dotfiles out of$HOME. As a side effect the XDG approach makes things more legible if you look in~/.config. — Where your program’s configuration files (‘dotfiles’) should go today
Shell programming is remarkably easy in many cases; what’s sad is that this common case (file processing) is far complicated than it needs to be. This is not a problem limited to shell; while shell is especially tricky, it is difficult to correctly process POSIX pathnames in all languages. — Filenames and Pathnames in Shell: How to do it Correctly (via The shell scripting trap)
2023-06-19: >>> import sqlean as sqlite3. #database #python
2023-06-20: Interesting Lisp-related stuff on this HN thread about Reddit. #lisp
2023-06-20: Just found out that we can get cover art with cmus thanks to this fork!
2023-06-20: Never used them, but I noticed there are now two alternative workflow to barebone Git: sapling and gitless.
2023-06-20: Functional Programming in Data Science Projects: Interesting thoughts about FP for statistical computing. Another take was once available on Brian Lee Yung Rowe’s weblog, soon to be published as Modeling Data With Functional Programming In R. Thomas Mailund also wrote some words about that approach (see Functional Data Structures in R). And of course, Mathematica with its native support for multiple programming paradigms would be a good candidate too. #statistics
2023-06-22: Desktop Linux Hardening. Lot of useful advices in this article. E.g.,
snapd (Snap) assigns a unique ID to your installation and uses it for telemetry. While this is generally not a problem, if your threat model calls for anonymity, you should avoid using Snap packages and uninstall snapd.
2023-06-22: Moving Blazingly Fast With The Core Vim Motions, but see the whole tutorial. The author makes use of sound illustrations and takes us on a tour of Vim’s core concepts, with casual or VS Code users in mind. #vim