Viewing profile — catenate

I've been using a little literate-programming shell script for years, for various personal and professional projects. I find it makes a huge difference in my ability to hand off a …

Since 1 June 2012, I've been taking notes in unicode text files, which contain (occasional or adjacent) lines starting with 'nb ' and then a list of tags. I wrote a simple tool ("n…

I made my own Secret Hitler deck, and have been playing it for a few months with both adult and teen groups for whom I usually run Werewolf games. SH has been really well received,…

I used Emacs from 1993-2004, and switched to Acme for the 11 years to present. I don't miss trying to memorize all the key combinations from Emacs. I like that Acme presents a clea…

I told Facebook to delete my account as soon as they implemented this feature, years ago, and I found that (at least at the time) I could not block it on my Android phone. So, at l…

Composing a larger program, by combining functions in different languages in a new framework, seems to take things in the direction of large and complicated programs. Would it not …

Was this a permanent or temporary effect on Algernon the mouse? If we continue the amino-acid mutation along the line of the difference between the mouse and human FOXP2, can we ex…

I use Inferno to develop software, as a virtual OS over top of Linux or Windows. Its community doesn't see any value in writing software just to make it easy to use for newbies. It…

The redo-inspired build tool I wrote abstracts the tasks of composing a build system, by replacing the idea of writing a build description file with command-line primitives which c…

Inspired somewhat by redo, I wrote "credo" as a set of small command-line build tools, so build description files are in the shell language rather than a standalone DSL. https://gi…

In high school I was blacklisted from an admin position for demonstrating that you could write in Digital Command Language a program that simulated the login environment, stored lo…

From the brightness, whiteness, and suddenness with which it switched off, I'd be far more inclined to think it's artificial.

I think the most important design criteria in the evolution of Unix to Plan 9 to Inferno was that each step consciously made things _simpler_. Simplify the programming model, use f…

Laughter and joking is a coping mechanism for dealing with uncomfortable and hostile situations. It's a way to blow off steam and accept things without reacting as aggressively as …

Berserker

Inspired by redo, I'm working on a similar project that takes advantage of some of the nicer features of the Inferno OS: sh features like apply, https://github.com/catenate/credo

I was able to teach myself Basic programming on a TI-99/4A, Atari 2600, and Commodore 64 from 4th grade (in the early 1980s) because the languages were simple, the machine was simp…

Unix fmt double-spaces after periods, except periods after single letters. Of course, that's only useful to you if you compose text in a text editor, and pipe it through fmt (or pa…

Communication in any form, but I was thinking of language in particular, yes. :)

There is an invention without which no other invention can spread beyond its inventor. An invention which makes possible inventions beyond the ability of one person to create. An i…

> Like the buckle on a seat belt, they are designed to be strong in the directions of forces that might be applied in normal use, and require pressure in an entirely different dire…

People like to put down scripting, especially shell scripting, as "not a real language." I prefer shell scripting, since it lets me tie together programs written in many languages,…

I noticed right away that the title had no capital letters. But I didn't notice that the body had none until I read this comment and looked back over the text. Neither time did the…

Aka polymorphic function parameters. If I manage to abstract a bit of functionality into a function, I don't care what the type is as long as the operations within the function wor…

I'd like to use map/fold/filter idioms instead of for loops, because this encourages me to write reusable functions instead of embedded blocks of code. To do this in Go, I need to …