(Or, The Value of Working at Lower Levels of Abstraction.)
I’m loving working in Scheme because it forces me to work from First Principles.
There’s a huge value in the convenience functions that most languages wrap around those first principles, but it’s like buying and using a car vs. building the car you’re using.
The latter is more work but you’re going to really understand how that car works and you’re going to have the perfect car for your needs.
Emacs is arguably the most powerful tool available to the modern programmer. Vim’s pretty close. Both require more effort to learn than say Atom or Sublime Text. But, the additional start-up effort pays off quickly.
Like Scheme, they both suck out-of-the-box. Unaltered they’re both horrible bare-bones skeletons of an editor. Their potential is incredible though. If you’re just going to do something quickly, and never spend the time to customize them, they are a terrible choice.
There’s a little known RPG called “Delve” that is not to be confused with Ironsworn Delve.
Welcome to Delve You awaken on a beach surrounded by the debris from a wrecked ship, you are not alone as others seem to be also awakening from their ordeal. You had no time to pack and all you have is what is in your pockets or what you can find amongst the wreckage. This begins your adventures on the island of Cragbarren.
There are a number of people who want to stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, but have found themselves making questionable decisions, because they’ve become acclimatized to it, and because they want to believe that their friends are healthy, because they look healthy, and reason that “of course, those friends are responsible, and I’m responsible, so it should be safe to get together and do something.”
Friends and family are the big problem.
I… really hate email.
By the time I left my last company I had successfully trained everyone around me to stop sending me email, or at least not expect me to have seen anything they sent me. My friends are similarly trained.
The thing is, I don’t actually hate email.
I hate traditional email clients and the bullshit usage patterns the force on us, and I hate the bullshit way most employers use email.
In 1987 I was a sophomore in High School. A teacher had an after-school class where he taught us to play Melee and Wizards. Our characters battled each other with spells and weapons on a wide open hex grid. Little cardboard punch-outs with terrible drawings marked our places on the map.
I loved it.
Decades later, as an adult, I payed someone $40 US for them, because I kept thinking about them.
The Cloud Problem When your data only exists in software that you don’t host yourself it is no longer yours. It can disappear at any moment. Its future is dependent upon a company’s continued profits and interests.
Imagine you’ve been building up a knowledge base for two years, but you fall on “hard times”. Maybe you can’t afford it. Maybe something happened and you’re literally unable to (accidents, medical issues, legal restrictions).
A little while ago there was a post about Programmer Migration Patterns through programming languages. I didn’t agree with it, but it got me thinking, about my 30+ years of programming, the languages I’ve been through, and when I can take away from that.
When I was a wee thing my mother brought home a used Texas Instruments TI99/4A that had been velcroed into a suitcase. I had a lot of fun with that computer.
SSH Keys can be a little confusing to new developers. Here’s a quick little metaphor to help you think about how they work.
tldr; Your public key is your business card. You can give it to people so that they can add it to the list of people authorized to access a machine or service. Your private key is a tool that proves that you’re the person associated with that business card.
There was a recent post* about how Go is Google’s language, not ours. It was an opinionated post, but it provided some evidence to back up its claims.
Russ Cox (a Tech Lead for the Go language) posted a reasoned response to this which, I think basically tried to say that it wasn’t true, and they had regular meetings to discuss community proposals.
But for me, the telling bit of it was this:
