Viewing profile — vincent-manis

er, no, it was licensed, but available to educational institutions. I remember having to send Bell Labs our university calendar when i wanted to get a copy of LSI-11 Unix circa 197…

There are 2 more that I would add, both books I read as an undergraduate nearly 60 years ago. First, Marvin Minsky's Computation: Finite And Infinite Machines (published 60 years a…

There are a number of image-based Scheme systems. Chibi Scheme and Chez Scheme come to mind. In both, you can save an image and reload it at a later time, though for very good reas…

I for one really appreciate Caps Lock. I always remap it as Compose.

SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someon…

Until the threat of anti-trust against IBM, and the latter's decision to “unbundle” its software from its hardware, in 1969. There had been proprietary software before that, but ve…

I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way m…

I have no opinion on the validity of this claim, but I do know that many students do not read things. I taught university level computer science for over 30 years. On midterms, I w…

One of the best labs I ever did in university (this was circa 1970), was to create an Initial Program Load (bootstrap) program for a virtual IBM System/360, which copied punch card…

Tk without Tcl?

Burgess reputedly disliked the American edition's inclusion of a glossary. I'm in partial agreement with that.The right way to read it is to let the language flow over you, and you…

I second the recommmendation, for these two systems with a caveat. MIT Scheme has not been made to run on Apple Silicon, though with a few tricks, the amd64 version is usable on a …

I always got a chuckle when Stargate went meta. They had a planet called Kelowna (a real BC city) and a country called Langara (I was for a time a faculty member at Langara College…

Tectonic would be more convincing if the authors wrote their documentation in LaTeX, rather than Markdown (and I do know about Pandoc).

I did that kind of thing when I first started using C (my attitude then was that C was fine, but it should have looked more like BCPL). I stopped after a short time.

That could well be, the article is still wrong.

I was puzzled by this claim, too. I think that the article is wrong, and that the code is written in HAL/S, a NASA-only language that sort of started off as a preprocessor to Fortr…

I have a Shinobi, and like it, but I recently got an HHKB Studio w, and really like it too.

So who became Xerox? (i.e., brilliant ideas, thrown away at the corporate level)

Versioned files existed in Tenex, developed by Bolt Beranek and Newman in the early 1970s; version numbering was based on a similar feature in MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System…

This is great...I would encourage you to add the ability for users to offer new languages. I noticed that Modula-2, PL/I, Trac Language, ALGOL 60, ALGOL68, and Joss/Focal could be …

Actually, variations on M-expressions have been created many times in the Lisp world. (Look what you can do with macros!) So far, none of them has caught on. The latest attempt for…

I'm on a convertible as I read this comments thread; I'm typing this comment on the keyboard, and scrolling the comments via the touchscreen. I have never bought the argument that …

Maybe replace clicky keyswitches with silent ones.

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsess…