vincent-manis

11 ms·

91.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
My spelling is generally very good, and I know the difference between “e.g.” and “i.e.”. I guess I'm an AI.
92.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
Being a Thunderbird user, I feel as though I've missed out on a critical development in tech history.
93.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I agree with another commenter that this doesn't tell the entire story, but it tells almost all of it. Nowadays, I discover some new piece of software, visit the Documentation section of its website, and the first thing I see is `How t
94.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I have a very nice Chromebook tablet (a Lenovo Duet). I use it to run a Debian Linux VM; it has its quirks, but I use it to run Emacs, TeX, and various Scheme implementations. It is relatively cheap, and even though it's a relatively l
95.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
Since iteration is a special case of recurson, this also tells us not to let user input cause an infinite or too-long-running loop. Profound, eh?
96.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I have no idea of the difference(s) in performance between wlroots and Gnome's compositor. Protocols do not have performance, implementations do. If someone can prove that the Wayland protocol, on a certain set of tasks, and in a certa
97.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
>If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime. I use Sway, which uses a different compos[i]tor than Gnome. I would like to see similar results for wlroots, Sway's compositor, though I&#x27
98.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
In my OS course, in 1969, I wrote an IPL (bootstrap) program that copied cards to the printer, running in supervisor mode. It ran on a 360 virtual machine under the MTS time-sharing system. Before that, I wrote programs in assembly language
99.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
Not sure which Fortran this refers to. I never used Fortran I, but as I understand it, names were up to 6 characters long, first character alphabetic; names with initial letter A-H and O-Z were REAL, I-M INTEGER (Fortran II added declaratio
100.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
One very small correction: QUIKTRAN wasn't a “mathematical utility”, but an early timesharing system, I think running on a 7044 (coincidentally, my first mainframe). It offered an interactive Fortran system, with editing and debugging
101.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I can't remember the number of times I have given up on software because there is no “Concepts and Facilities” document that gives me a mental model of what the program will do and how I operate it. Instead, one sees a website with a m
102.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I haven't looked at it, but it's purely functional (so no destructive operations such as set!). It can't be called Scheme, because it's a subset of RnRS Scheme; that's why Racket isn't called PLT-Scheme any mor
103.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I have a smart TV running Roku. I still use cable (for news), so the other 2 sources I see are the 2 computers I have connected. The only time I ever see Roku is when I'm selecting a source. The TV is smart, but I'm smarter: no Et
104.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I am not surprised that large-scale programs were written in Dartmouth Basic, or that those programs satisfied the needs of their users. Some program libraries include programs in unstructured Fortran IV, which have been running satisfactor
105.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I was 13 when DTSS was introduced, so never had an opportunity to learn programming with Basic. Fortunately, that didn't harm me, and I've managed to compensate for this disadvantage. I don't want in any way to minimize the i
106.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
OK, since we're wasting our time on the Pointless Editor War, I shall confess I know exactly one thing about Vim, the command `:q!'. That's all I've ever needed to know.
107.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
Many years ago, I was a user of an IBM 1130 computer system. It filled a small room, with (as I recall) 16K 16-bit words and a 5MB disk drive, which was quite noisy. I would feed in my Fortran program, then head down to the other end of the
108.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I am proudly not-normal, in that case.
109.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
If I were rewriting Emacs, I would not replace its language with Python, Lua, or Cobol. I don't like those languages, and I have just as much right to say that as the people who don't like Lisp.
110.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
One of the best-known results in turtle geometry is that drawing any closed path results in you turning exactly (a multiple of) 360 degrees, the Total Turtle Trip Theorem. You get into calculus by considering a circle to be the limit of `fo
111.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I used to joke with a friend of mine who was of Netherlands descent by saying that Dutch is misspelled English. (And, yes, I'm aware of the several rounds of orthographic reforms that Dutch has experienced.)
112.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I went through the whole thing, but I liked none of the fonts--not even Inconsolata, which I used for years--as much as Cascadia Code, which in its most recent incarnation even has a Nerd Font/Powerline version.
113.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I have fond memories of the System/360 M67 (and its successors, starting with a System/370 M168) I used from 1970 to the early 1980s. It ran the Michigan Terminal System, and we had all the modern conveniences (terminal operation
114.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
Pandoc
115.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
One of my grad student colleagues once asked a faculty member whose specialty was discrete-event simulation what he knew about garbage collection. The prof was taken aback and said, “almost nothing”, until the student clarified that he was
116.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
There was a time when I could toggle the PDP-8 RIM bootstrap loader by heart (my programs had a nasty habit of destroying the memory-resident copy by accident).
117.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
I remember that a lace card was a really good way of jamming an IBM 029 (or 026) card. You put the card in the feed hopper, and selected DUPlicate, it would almost always jam in the read station.
118.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
Seems to me that building for breadth can trigger overengineering. You build functionality that isn't wanted, but is a logical consequence of your platform and the other functionality that you do have use cases for. This is an expendit
119.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
Actually, I'm very glad that Thompson, Ritchie, and friends used these strange names for the commands they implemented (supposedly because they didn't like to type long words). This leaves longer, more meaningful names open for me
120.
by vincent-manis 2y ago
And yet the vast majority of Canadians live happy, productive lives. Our healthcare system does indeed have major problems (waiting list lengths in particular), but everybody has coverage. And as for low wages, that is why so many supposedl

More ›