mikelevins

13 ms·

61.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I was in Weird Stuff Warehouse in Santa Clara in about 1990 and they had three fully kitted-out 1108s sitting on the floor for about $600 each, with software and manuals and so forth. I went home to deal with something or other, intending t
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by mikelevins 4y ago
I have one of these and I like it a lot: https://www.roland.com/us/products/handsonic_hpd-20/ It's not a substitute for a regular drum kit, but it you like hand drums it's pretty cool in combination
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by mikelevins 4y ago
My mother, my daughter, and I create movie- and series-watching projects, and then watch through a bunch of things that have good to great ratings from critic aggregators. Currently we are watching through various things that deal with Russ
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by mikelevins 4y ago
My standard poodle and I befriended a doe in the woods next to a nearby lake. She was pretty bold to begin with. My poodle was of course very excited the first time we met, but she was also well behaved, and when I asked her to sit down and
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by mikelevins 4y ago
That kind of argument seems to presuppose that humanity is distinct from nature. It's not unique in that, of course; lots of things people say presuppose that humanity is separate from nature, so in that sense, it's a perfectly or
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by mikelevins 4y ago
Being a great tech writer is pretty ambitious. Maybe start with wanting to be a competent one. The way I learned was by being a junior writer at Apple surrounded by much better writers and professional editors. They assigned me what they th
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by mikelevins 4y ago
Your point is well taken. Consider my remark a bit of hyperbole--though I've definitely been in more than one conversation in which tech docs professionals described something as "engineering docs" with the clear meaning that
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by mikelevins 4y ago
Apple and Cisco are two examples of companies with large, well-organized technical documentation teams. I've worked on both teams. There are certainly many other examples. I've also worked for a few startups on setting up their te
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by mikelevins 4y ago
I used Lispworks alongside SBCL and other Common Lisps for about 16 years. Once in a while I had a problem with some quicklisp library in Lispworks, but it was infrequent.
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by mikelevins 4y ago
It can be done. I did it. In my mid 40s I developed a chronic illness that rendered me unable to work for a few years. It bankrupted me and sank my career before I found the right doctor and started rebuilding. I had to more or less start o
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by mikelevins 4y ago
Yes, I noticed that, too. I used Icon to process a big pile of code at Apple in the late 80s and found it pleasant to work with.
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by mikelevins 4y ago
Speaking as a sometime professional tech writer, your advice is good. The best way I know to get rapidly better at technical writing is to write a lot with ongoing feedback from a capable professional editor. A good editor will teach you to
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by mikelevins 4y ago
The versions of these that I tinker with in my spare time are a little too ambitious to reach fruition as spare-time hobby projects (especially since there's also other stuff that occupies my spare time), but I do sometimes break off b
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by mikelevins 4y ago
Three things: 1. A Lisp that makes some improvements on Common Lisp in a few areas without losing its essential nature, including its comprehensive support for livecoding. 2. An OS designed for ubiquitous computing and strong individual own
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by mikelevins 4y ago
In my case, because I'm always working, whether I'm being paid or not.
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by mikelevins 4y ago
I'd say it's roughly equivalent to the value of preserving any cultural artifact--a language, a musical tradition, holidays, folklore, religions, ancient martial traditions, and so on. Languages are cultural artifacts that contain
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by mikelevins 4y ago
I praise CLOS because I've used it quite a bit and I like it. CLOS is an object-system construction kit as much as it is an object system. I generally like to solve problems by building a language in which the solution is simple and st
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by mikelevins 4y ago
"Easily" is a stretch, for sure, but John Wainwright developed a framework that he called "oic", for "Objects in C", that was a fairly substantial subset of CLOS. I met him at OOPSLA ‘89 (or it might have been
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by mikelevins 4y ago
Maybe, though Alan Kay is certainly familiar with other object-oriented programming systems for Lisp that predate the design of CLOS.
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by mikelevins 4y ago
That’s the one. An intelligent and enthusiastic group of players can extend it indefinitely. It’s all lawyering and deal making, even more than Diplomacy, it can continue for hours and hours, and you dare not leave the room for a second, le
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by mikelevins 4y ago
I was a member of an enthusiastic friends-and-family gaming group through the early and middle 1980s. We spent a good chunk of that time on Diplomacy, then moved to modified Diplomacy on custom maps (my first wife worked for USGS Map Sales,
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by mikelevins 4y ago
The thing that always makes me cave and install brew is I want to try some tool and its default install assumes brew. Now, I'll bet in close to 100% of cases I could get things to work with stuff from MacPorts instead, but I've ac
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by mikelevins 4y ago
You don't absolutely have to use brew, but there's a sort of relentless soft pressure to use it because it's more or less the de facto standard package manager for macOS and has such a large collection of packages. I rather d
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by mikelevins 4y ago
All great suggestions. I'd add Moving Mars.
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by mikelevins 4y ago
That seems like a tall order, though a worthwhile one. You of course need a way to create a repl with visibility into the dynamic context from which it's created, which implies representing dynamic context in a way that's convenie
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by mikelevins 4y ago
There are a lot of dialects because its core is one of the easiest programming languages to understand and implement, and once implemented, it's one of the easiest languages to extend. That's all there is to it, pretty much. Anyon
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by mikelevins 4y ago
The Vujic post describes repl-driven development as "[evaluating] variables, code-blocks, functions, or an entire module [to] get instant feedback, just by hitting a key combination in your favorite code editor." Speaking from the
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by mikelevins 4y ago
I do like to talk about Lisp. I've also written or contributed to several projects and products written Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, and (back when it was a Lisp) Dylan. These include, but are not limited to the following. Some of the
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by mikelevins 4y ago
Thirty years ago was 1992. I was an employee of Apple Computer. I had spent a year or two working on a knowledge-based machine-control application that Apple used to test prerelease system software for application-compatibility problems. A
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by mikelevins 4y ago
Yep. Good point.

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