wduquette

8 ms·

91.
by wduquette 11mo ago
The tooling.
92.
by wduquette 11mo ago
I first experimented with Lisp back in the mid-80’s, and have returned to it time and again—not as a language for serious projects, but just as a way of learning new techniques and new ways to think about writing software. I’ve tried using
93.
by wduquette 11mo ago
What killed Perl for me was readability, long before Perl 6/Raku. I was an Awk programmer from way back, so took to Perl quickly once it was available. Then in the late 90's I wrote a utility program in Perl that generated some
94.
by wduquette 11mo ago
This is true. I did a lot of this once upon a time, with great success.
95.
by wduquette 11mo ago
Reminds me of the pre-GitHub days, when I had to use CM tools designed to appeal to project and CM managers, not to the poor developers who had to use them every day. Anybody else remember Harvest?
96.
by wduquette 1y ago
I've been doing development using JavaFX, Swing's successor, for many years. It's got its quirks, and places where the dev team stopped iterating on the API a little too soon; but it works and does some really nice stuff.
97.
by wduquette 1y ago
AI of this kind is nothing more than AI-generated companionship porn. It's destructive of users and of real relationships, as we're already seeing with earlier generations of chatbots (including non-LLM chatbots).
98.
by wduquette 1y ago
I'd like to see this succeed, but I'm skeptical that a small team can keep up with the major players in this area. Many years ago Dan Kennedy (of the SQLite team) wrote a lovely HTML widget for TCL/TK. It rendered CSS 1.0 q
99.
by wduquette 1y ago
I once walked around Westwood with my future wife telling her all about Karp-reductions of NP-complete problems. Somehow we now have four kids.
100.
by wduquette 1y ago
Leuchtturm 1917 dot grid journal, Uniball Jetstream pen, and a minimalist version of Ryder Carroll's bullet journaling advice. ( https://bulletjournal.com ) I like the Leuchtturm journals because they have page numbers and th
101.
by wduquette 1y ago
Unless you're solving the same old problem for the Nth time for a new customer, you don't really understand the problem fully until you write the code. If it's a new problem, you need to write the code so that you discover al
102.
by wduquette 1y ago
Dunno. I’ve been at this since the late ‘80’s, and have run into precious few developers who were interested in software and programming for its own sake. For most of them it was just a job.
103.
by wduquette 1y ago
I'm sure it has evolved, but Midnight Command began as a recreation of Norton Commander for DOS PCs. I've not used Midnight Commander in particular, but back in my DOS programming days Norton Commander was my best friend.
104.
by wduquette 1y ago
"they are AWFUL at stats." SF author Michael Flynn was a process control engineer as his day job; he wrote about how designing statistically valid experiments is incredibly difficult, and the potential for fooling yourself is high
105.
by wduquette 1y ago
Yes. And so's my code, so to speak.
106.
by wduquette 1y ago
I did not say that my brain uses linguistic representations internally when I think; I said that the process of turning my ideas into words helps me think.
107.
by wduquette 1y ago
I remember the dotCom bubble. After the bubble burst, people got on with putting storefronts and other kinds of business on-line in a more sober fashion. I predict the same thing will happen with the current AI tools: the bubble will burst
108.
by wduquette 1y ago
But taking notes and writing ideas out requires that we think them through...which we usually don't do otherwise. This has been a commonplace of the intellectual life for centuries.
109.
by wduquette 1y ago
I arrange my code to follow a certain order, so that I can get my head back into a given module quickly. I don't remember everything ; there's too much over the weeks, months, and years. But I can remember enough to find what I
110.
by wduquette 1y ago
In my experience, a lot of the hard thinking gets done in my back-brain while I'm doing other things, and emerges when I take up the problem again. Doing the regular work gives my back-brain time to percolate; doing hard thing after h
111.
by wduquette 1y ago
Not knocking your history, but I gotta say that Wolfenstein-3D was like nothing I'd ever seen...and I played the original Wolfenstein on the Apple II--and the original Wizardry as well, which is a lot more to the point than Rogue IMHO.
112.
by wduquette 1y ago
I do what the author does all the time, every day. But then, I work mostly on my own; and I've spent decades learning how to structure my code so as to minimize the amount that has to be "live" in my head at any give moment,
113.
by wduquette 1y ago
There were lots of blogs that were personal diaries back in the early days; but there were always many blogs the weren't. The first "web log", in my opinion, was the page at NCSA, home of the Mosaic browser, that was literal
114.
by wduquette 1y ago
I was the first person I knew to learn HTML; that was in the mid-90’s. I had a personal website from December of 1996, where I posted mostly book reviews; later it evolved into a hand-coded blog, followed by MovableType, followed by WordPr
115.
by wduquette 1y ago
It’s true. I remember the glory days of the “Blogosphere”: the Truth-Laid Bear’s blog ecosystem (I was a finny fish at one point, IIRC), USS Clueless, 2Blowhards, servers going down under the weight of an Instalanche, and many many others
116.
by wduquette 1y ago
And in fact I eventually went from Apple Pascal to Turbo Pascal on a Kaypro 4 running CP/M-80. It was like coming home.
117.
by wduquette 1y ago
The OP says that 8-bit CPUs couldn't handle Pascal well, and that Action! (release in 1983) was the first IDE for 8-bit machines. But Apple Pascal was released for the Apple II in 1979. Based on UCSD Pascal, the Apple Pascal system wa
118.
by wduquette 1y ago
I was born in the early 60’s, and I don’t recall my elders ever using “jerk” in what the OP calls the original sense. I have always understood it in the “modern” sense.
119.
by wduquette 1y ago
I do use an Elgato stream deck for entering Unicode symbols, and I think what's really needed in this space is a cross between a stream deck and the Mathpad: programmable keys with LCD key caps, and some shift keys to increase the num
120.
by wduquette 1y ago
Re: ant, make that two of us. I use Gradle these days since IntelliJ doesn't work well with ant; but when I want to precisely control how a build is done and produce exactly the build products I want, I use ant. It's stable, it&#

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