Here’s the monthly review of interesting things I found while browsing Hacker News, Twitter, or RSS feeds.

• Non-POSIX file systems is such a great piece of writing about POSIX and other filesystems, by a prolific Scheme coder.

  Multics enabled a superior paradigm for storage management and backups. Xerox Alto allowed a disk structure to be restored even if all metadata blocks had been damaged. Hydra used a capability system to provide a powerful protection mechanism for data. All of these enabled interesting types of functionality that we are missing in POSIX.

• I subscribed to svetlyak40wt’s Lisp Project of the Day during the Summer, and I learned a lot of nice tips about Lisp and existing libraries. For instance, cl-flat-tree is a small Lisp library for working with binary trees.

• Do a pile of work better. Another post by Ned Batchelder, where we learn how Python’s concurrent.futures module works.

• The Neovim TUI experience is really slick, and it remains so fast. Even if I don’t load a lot of plugins, it remains by far the fastest text editor available on my Macbook. In addition, spell checking is better than Flyspell, and I believe Ale has nothing to envy to Flycheck. Yet, I spent a significant amount of time configuring my Doom Emacs to offer an enhanced user experience when running in a terminal, and it now start in just under 1.5s, which is great (yeah, I know server-start & Co). My core Emacs keybindings (via which-key) are similar to what I use in Neovim, so I am not lost when I switch from one to the other.¹

  Emacs is the only serious program I know which manages to be truly user interface independent, in addition to being platform-independent. Emacs works with graphical toolkits on all major platforms, but also offers a almost-feature-complete text interface. — Emacs is very special regarding UIs

• Share a Tmux session. Interesting use of the -S flag to specify a socket. I mostly use Tmux on a remote server, but this is just to benefit from a persistent session and of course multipane facilities.

• These days, I don’t write a lot of Stata code. Not a single line of code in 3 months, TBH. However, thanks to a link found in one of Andrew Wheeler’s recent posts’, I was reminded that the grstyle is a very nice approach to customizing the look and feel of Stata graphics. By the way, regarding Python graphing facilities, there’s a new one from JetBrains: lets-plot. Apparently, it is intended to be use in JetBrains IDEs or in a Jupyter notebook, but it’s quite interesting to know that we have yet another Ggplot-inspired graphical backend in the Python ecosystem.

• A few days ago I learned that there’s now a Clojure dataframe library that runs on Spark: geni. It seems to be a pretty serious project, nicely illustrated and with lot of documentation.

• If you’re interested in TUI and cli environments, you’re likely to appreciate the following blog post: everything you ever wanted to know about terminals. It provides a deep review of ncurses and ASCII escape codes, with illustrations in C.

• What Clojure spec is and what you can do with it. It’s been a long time since I’ve written a script in Clojure. Last year I decided to work with Clojurescript, and then I switched to more traditional Javascript. In the meantime I got interested in Racket and Typescript. But as I still find so many interesting articles about Clojure after more than 10 years of technology watch, I think I should really get into it, especially as it seems to me at the moment the only real candidate language for data science.

• Some free discrete maths textbooks by Ed Bender.