Viewing profile — mheathr

One of my favorite Scheme reads was an e-mail discussion on whether it was possible to add OOP to a functional programming language, and then the author goes on to do so in a trivi…

Programs and procedures yield algorithms.

Shannon was an electrical engineer by training and while all of his works have applications in computer science, their origins were solutions to engineering or math problems.

(replying to the child post) The products are not the same if for no other reason than because one comes with the receiver and ordering the other product does not, and that the rec…

There actually exists two separate Microsoft Wireless 360 controllers, the one that specifies for Windows will work on both the PC and for the Xbox 360 (after syncing the controlle…

Are you talking about the ones advertises for PC or the ones not sold for PC? When I bought mine (circa 2010) I had to purchase one advertises for PC as the one I had for the 360 b…

The Emacs documentation is excellent and among the handful of products that have documentation that approaches that of Vim's in any meaningful way, but the PDF does not have interp…

This includes both the user's manual, the reference manual, and platform specific information in one file. The user's manual is a subset of the reference manual, and that is 500-60…

Well, provided that you find the 360 controller's d-pad acceptable, the wired xbox 360 controller works directly, however the wireless 360 controller does not work directly, a diff…

I find trackballs (the Logitech M570 in particular) much more comfortable to use over long periods of time personally. The only criticism I have of their design is that having the …

I have read it from the beginning, and the individuals who maintain the documentation likely have as well. What format supports interpage linking, can be displayed both electronica…

A clean room reimplementation of Dtrace is on my list of ideal computing wants that will probably never happen. Also on the list is everyone targeting the same hypervisor for devic…

If you have not already and can do so, I highly recommend adding Dtrace to your C development toolkit. Dtrace, Valgrind, and GDB make rooting out C runtime issues a lot more pleasa…

Lispworks is an excellent commercial IDE as well, however its editor is not as nice (but similar to Emacs) as using Emacs itself and the license is quite expensive compared to othe…

The Lisp Hackers interviews are also a good resource and quite interesting. The use case I found the most surprising was a developer using CL to prototype chip ideas at Intel befor…

If the language can do so competently, why not? I think that would be a great leap forward for programming as it would consolidate efforts developing libraries, documentation, and …

There are at least 6 that are explicitly used (there are more in practice but they are mostly transparent of rare and even realizing this will require reading some of the more esot…

I also use Emacs (and Vim). While I respect the research done concerning modal UI and the associated consequences of that in the context of HCI, in practice I do not find that ther…

Certainly use whatever tools you like, however emacs and Sublime Text cannot be compared directly to one another. Sublime Text and Vim or some other text editor can be, however tex…

I am a big Vim fan and promote its design for the most part, however with Lisp paredit and redshank covers text object movement, editing, and refactoring entirely so there is no be…

I use both Vim and Emacs, and in most contexts Evil-Mode within Emacs that emulates most of Vim's vanilla functions. Emacs also has modal editing that allows for per mode based key…

Then force unique passwords without requiring the users to remember them, something which is both easier for users and more secure.

Perhaps a more cogent axiom is to reason ethically rather than aim to maintain politeness. That has the added effect of distilling whether the audience is someone that can be reaso…

Org-mode has an exporter for latex and making new skeletons for its export is fairly straight forward. I am liking it a lot and have changed to that over writing tex by hand nowada…

I feel much the same. Even on OS X the potential of NeXTstep remains largely unrealized as most apps do not take advantage of the APIs in a way that allows leveraging heterogeneous…