Viewing profile — mdhughes

Which eggs? I'm on Mac, and in Chicken 5 currently, everything has "just worked". SDL required me to hit the SDL site for the frameworks, the rest I've used have had no external re…

I've never had a Windows, I'm a Mac nerd, but I'm looking into it for cross-platform binaries. Option 1: MS has a Linux subsystem now. Problem solved, but maybe not customer-friend…

[Chicken Scheme]( https://call-cc.org ) is fast, makes native binaries, and has a giant library of "eggs" covering most of the SRFIs. It's R5RS working its way towards R7RS. I've b…

I spend most of my time now in Chicken Scheme http://call-cc.org/ and it's very productive, has a ton of libraries ("eggs"), and makes nice, fast native binaries. Scheme's right on…

Go ahead and invent some totally unique tool nobody's ever seen before. I'll wait. You, uh, you got one yet? No? The point is to make your own version of a thing; it doesn't have t…

Without the experience of making and supporting such tools, you'll never acquire wisdom, or many useful skills. Thought.py is maybe my 4th note-taking system, simpler and more prec…

Why, so have I, and so has every other programmer on Earth. https://mdhughes.tech/thoughtpy/ This has been mostly used as my engineering notebook, in lieu of stacks of Moleskines. …

I'm one of the people who kicked in for the Megatokyo visual novel kickstarter. Years later, no visible progress; I'm not even mad, I knew exactly what I was signing up for, which …

Strongly disagree. VS Code is a corporate tool IDE, which is dull and awkward to use as just an editor, and binary spyware in it "phones home" to its users' masters in Redmond. It'…

Very simplistic and shallow list, but it's by Charles Petzold, noted Microsoft shill and bad tech book writer. In '96, LISP (tail end of the AI winter regardless), Perl (half the W…

Slack is a poorly-written Electron app, and unfortunately it's the poster child for it. Discord does more with a fraction of the resources, and is also Electron. Atom is a giant ed…

Cross-platform is the key problem. If I want to write a Mac-only app, I can do that in Objective-C/Cocoa, and be quite happy. For Linux, native means fighting with primitive C and …

This is using Python 2, which is end-of-lifed. Those bare print statements are gauche. Python does have a variable keyword, `global`. While JavaScript can omit semicolons, it's an …

You can actually run LUA scripts from chat, exactly the same way: ``` /script d("Hello") ``` But the PC/Mac ESO community tends to be older (rated M) and less gullible in chat. Gol…

I'm not hostile, riffing on a cartoon is what humans call "humor". While I have no problem with "Scheme is Spock", I'd put Captain Pike in his beeping wheelchair in the CLISP slot,…

Right, Scheme is used and those uses are reflected in the spec(s). The minimalism of Scheme is what makes it easier to optimize, but that's not why it's alive. If LISP users want t…

Scheme moves forward because it's not a rotting corpse as LISP is pictured in that cartoon, it's a still-living language. Scheme's not admired for its purity and historic role, but…

While that's what I grew up with, too, it's probably too isolated anymore. Find a cheap laptop or desktop, or a pi, install Python3, and make IDLE easy to reach. For graphics, "imp…

[Chipmunk BASIC]( http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/ ) is a nice console-usable BASIC on most platforms. You can work with it line-numbered, or structured, and has some graphics a…

Do you want safe, reliable money at the cost of your conscience? Do you want to be one tiny cog in the machine that tracks and annihilates humanity? Choose Google. Do you want adve…

I used elm until late-90s when Y2K looked likely to end it. What I've learned since quitting elm is that mutt was better at processing large mailfiles, and then Apple Mail is easie…

Why would someone use this instead of IDLE, which ships with Python and does the same things?

When using a new version of a compiler, and existing code stops working, it is often a compiler error. When different compilers give different results, it is often a compiler error…

See also: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/11/09/enduring-xcode-and-source...

OS X, iOS, and all new APIs consumed by Swift on those platforms are written in Obj-C or C++, never in Swift. So what's "stagnant"? It's true that few others have adopted Objective…