vincent-manis

6 ms·

31.
by vincent-manis 6mo ago
I'm on a convertible as I read this comments thread; I'm typing this comment on the keyboard, and scrolling the comments via the touchscreen. I have never bought the argument that there should be one modality of input (or output).
32.
by vincent-manis 6mo ago
Maybe replace clicky keyswitches with silent ones.
33.
by vincent-manis 6mo ago
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally
34.
by vincent-manis 7mo ago
C was following PL/I.
35.
by vincent-manis 7mo ago
And just to point out that there is WinCompose, for Windows, and a somewhat janky but usable solution using Karabiner Elements and macos-compose for Mac.
36.
by vincent-manis 7mo ago
I was present at the IFIP 1978 conference in Toronto where Dijkstra announced that personal computing was a dead end because most people don't know how to program. There's an irony about the design of ALGOL 68. It was denounced at
37.
by vincent-manis 7mo ago
I agree with you. Edlin forever!!!
38.
by vincent-manis 7mo ago
In the 1970s, I temporarily relocated from Vancouver to Boston. A few days after I arrived, someone said, “After work, I'm going to take the T [subway] to BC.” I was awed by the concept of a continental mass-transit system, but puzzle
39.
by vincent-manis 7mo ago
Please define “corrupt”.
40.
by vincent-manis 7mo ago
There once was a country named Czechoslovakia.
41.
by vincent-manis 8mo ago
With all due respect to Wirth, P-Code did not originate in a vacuum. Martin Richards's BCPL compiler, dating from the late 1960s, targeted a hypothetical OCode machine. Furthermore, although there were backends for this that generated
42.
by vincent-manis 8mo ago
Performative indeed!
43.
by vincent-manis 8mo ago
I found the article tedious, even though I agree with its main point. However, the so-called “obvious” signs it was written by an AI—quotation marks and em-dashes—are within the ability of anyone with a Compose key (on Linux/BSD, ask y
44.
by vincent-manis 8mo ago
If I couldn't have Scheme, I'd happily take CL.
45.
by vincent-manis 9mo ago
And on the issue of using the INT instruction, dispatching into a table of kernel routines is very much not new, going back far beyond the EMT instruction to the System/360 SVC instruction. Given that Paterson has stoutly denied ever l
46.
by vincent-manis 9mo ago
Nope, I got "four seven six five", which is exactly how I would read that number if it were a street address, or a phone extension, or an inumber, or the like. You will notice that the site doesn't give any context about the
47.
by vincent-manis 9mo ago
I tried "4765" (four syllables), and got "sixty-nine squared plus four" (6 syllables). The ICAO phonetic alphabet specifically pronounces "4" as "fouwer", and "9" as "niner", so as
48.
by vincent-manis 10mo ago
I am very fond of Merriweather (which I recently saw on a list of over-used fonts, for those who believe that you should use a different obscure and, hopefully, hard to read font in every document). It pairs nicely with Merriweather Sans, C
49.
by vincent-manis 11mo ago
BCD, actually, given that Fortran dates from the mid-1950s. EBCDIC only appeared more or less around Fortran IV, in the early 1960s. Many printers in those days had a 48-character chain/train. After upper-case letters, digits, and a fe
50.
by vincent-manis 11mo ago
Yes, what OS did the Egyptians use?
51.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
One thing I discovered during decades of teaching at university. 18-year olds have little skill planning. Our first-year course had one-week assignments, but one more in-depth two-week assignment. This was at a time when students used compu
52.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
Like how to analyze requirements, how to document their work, or even how to problem-solve during debugging.
53.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
I once proposed a similar course at a major CS department where I was a junior faculty member. The response was “This is a university, we don't do things like this.” Result: students who couldn't use a debugger, did not know how t
54.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
I worked at 3 universities and one multi-national company over 30 years. I used Emacs at all of them. I'm retired now, and still use Emacs daily.
55.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
The point about bounds checking in `safe' languages is well taken, it does prevent 100% test coverage. As we all agree, SQLite has been exhaustively tested, and arguments for bounds checking in it are therefore weakened. Still, that&#x
56.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
No, MUMPS (or M) is a remote descendant of JOSS, an interactive language of the 1950s. JOSS has all sorts of variants (DEC's FOCAL language of the 1960s was a dialect), but I think MUMPS is the only living one. MUMPS code is mostly unr
57.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
And was dinged.
58.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
These work in both X and Wayland, even though they are an X feature. X/Wayland will consult the standard file, but will also consult a file ~/.XCompose. A number of people have created files with extended compose sequences, of whi
59.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
By default, the key emits a hitherto unused scancode, 0x6E. Windows maps this to something like `Left Shift+Super+F23', and then allows the user to define a suitable shortcut. For reasons I don't understand, remapping this combo i
60.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
F23, in kernels 6.14 and later. You can use standard tools for your environment to bind that to whatever you like.

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