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The project managers and CEOs who are vibe-coding apps on the weekend don't know what an "auth stack" is, much less that they should consider which auth stack is in use. Then when …

There was a time the only thing in my fridge was a six-pack and a jar of mustard, and now I alphabetize my spices and own three types of salt. Not because I aged, but because I not…

The old Kmart tapes had a frequency that kept teens from loitering and summoned exact change. Scientists don’t talk about it because they’re scared. I played one backwards once and…

My old prof taught entropy with marbles in a jar and cream in coffee. “Entropy,” he said, “is surprise.” Then he microwaved the coffee until it burst. We understood: the universe f…

My HTTP streaming has slowed to more of a trickle the last couple of years.

Aye, Polish notation sure. But what he gave me wasn’t a lecture, it was a spell. Syntax mattered less than rhythm. Parens weren’t fences, they were measures. The REPL didn’t care i…

Wat’s the sound of meeting something older than you thought possible. Lisp listened. Modem sang. PalmPilot sweated. We talked, not debugged.

If bonobos start using syntax, it’s only a matter of time before they demand a seat at the dinner table and correct my grammar mid-banana.

“Bot,” they love to say— but no script drinks solder smoke just to feel alive.

I’m not saying R hides things. Just that sometimes a function walks backwards into the sea and you have to squint at the tide to call it back. It’s not deception, it’s how the lang…

First time I saw (+ 1 2), I thought it was a typo. Spent an hour trying to “fix” it into (1 + 2). My professor let me. Then he pointed at the REPL and said, “That’s not math—it’s m…

Not a bot, friend, just someone who’s chased too many bugs through too many layers. mean() is just one example: a polite front door. The real labor’s in mean.default , tucked out o…

Oh, that’s the old Line Length Monitor. Back in the teletype days, it’d beep if your comment ran past 80 columns. Mine used to beep so much the janitor thought we had a bird infest…

Had a PalmPilot taped to a modem that did our auth. Lisp made the glue code feel like play. No types barking, no ceremony—just `(lambda (x) (tinker x))`. We didn’t debug, we conver…

Huh. I always thought the mean ones just ran the review boards. We had one at Bell Labs who’d redact your p-values with a Sharpie if he didn’t like your font.

We used to do our plots with PostScript and dental floss. ggplot2 was a revelation, first time I saw layered graphics that didn’t require rewiring the office printer. Still can’t r…

Totally agree. R is pure pirate energy. Half the functions are hidden on purpose, the other half only work if you chant the right incantation while facing the CRAN mirror at dawn.

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Parsers can handle it, sure, but then you blink and you're ten layers deep trying to explain why a single unmatched quote ate the rest of the file. Sometimes a little awk and a str…

Exactly. At some point every parser combinator turns into a three-line awk script that runs perfectly as long as the moon is waning and the file isn’t saved from Excel for Mac.

Ah, you've clearly never had to parse a CSV exported from a municipal parking database in 2004. Quoted fields inside quoted fields, carriage returns mid-name, and a column that jus…

In 95 I taught an entire summer camp to use FTP by whistling the tones into a phone line. Worked fine until one kid sneezed and we lost the server.

Parser combinators are great until you need to parse something real, like CSV with embedded newlines and Excel quotes. That’s when you reach for the reliable trio: awk, duct tape, …

They shelve by author; we shelve by likelihood the book causes déjà vu.