51–60 of 70 posts
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I'm delighted to have been of some service.
I'm a native English speaker and the article reads very naturally. I've been learning Spanish over the last two plus years, and I'm jealous of how regular and consistent Spanish is compared to English.
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One of my favorite pastimes on my TRS-80 and TRS-80 color computer was to type in a simple basic program that would poke random values into random memory addresses and see how long it would take to crash or do something else. Sometimes the value would wind up in the basic program itself and it would stop. Mostly it just locked up and I had to hit the power button and try again.
Pretty sure I broke a VIC-20 or two doing something like this.
Lots of hints of Dutch grammar in here: > if you are using macOS you'll be able to edit easily the files I find it charming though, to be honest :)
I think it maybe points to shared features of European languages that English doesn't follow.
CD-ROMs and only 128k of RAM? Sorry, that doesn't pass the smell test. Once CD-ROMs were available, 2-digit megabytes of RAM were standard (and affordable) for home PCs.
CD-ROMs were available long before the mid-90s and even 8086-class machines could be equipped with them. They were just very expensive, and there wasn't a consumer market for them until the "multimedia" craze hit which required a 386 or 486 with at least 4 MiB of RAM (8 or more was better). But public libraries, for instance, had InfoTrac machines as early as the late 80s, which were XT- or AT-class machines that pul…
One is to work on a super low spec machine because things were really expensive and the tech scrap in Mexico at the time just didn't have anything better. Fine, believable.
The other is that CD-ROM drives were available much earlier than the general public believes, just that they were really expensive. Fine, also believable.
But it's much harder to believe that both are true for the same person at the same time and place. Either they couldn't afford the CR-ROM drive or they could afford more RAM. Moving forward on the time axis strengthens one argument (CD-ROM drive availability since those got cheaper over time) at the expense of weakening the other.
Lots of hints of Dutch grammar in here: > if you are using macOS you'll be able to edit easily the files I find it charming though, to be honest :)
The author is a native Spanish speaker, so that would be unexpected. I think it maybe points to shared features of European languages that English doesn't follow.
Huh, apologies. I have a Dutch friend who has similar quirks in their English, and the article mentions Dutch by name (in "A Dutch operating system"), so I assumed the author was Dutch or that that quirk came from Dutch influence.
For what it's worth, Dutch is not the only language that does this, I'm pretty sure German does as well, and a bunch more. So you may be correct.
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When something doesn't match your expectations you (and others reading along) can often learn a lot more if you start with the assumption you had missing information rather than the assumption it's just incorrect. Even in cases where the story really does have an error by asking about it instead of asserting it you are more likely to hear something additional you didn't know before.
When somebody questions a description that by the face of it violates general sanity checks then you (and others reading along) can often contribute more to the discussion by providing the context in which it makes sense, rather than berating the commenter for being critical and not just buying into any claim posted on the internet.
If the other commenters left additional discussions on the table I didn't consider let's chat about them. You've also got the author themselves as the poster and in the comments so they may be able to shed more light than I ever could on that side though. It looks like they've since left a comment about the technical approach in the source.
I started programming in 1977/78 in CBM/PET Basic on a Commodore PET 2001 with cassette tape drive and 32k upgrade. I loved those days. My parents didn't understand what the deal was with the costly computer I saved up for at age 13, and why I thought it was so important. It also required many late hours on my part on school nights. I moved on to assembler and C and many other languages over the years. I had a renais…
Thanks for sharing! Mine was a pretty similar experience in the eighties, because you could learn so much just by reading books and doing experiments. Recently, I got three Commodore 64 (the descendants of the PET) and I just want to type some BASIC games and start learning. I'm very humbled by the experience of writing "Programming Boot Sector Games", because like you, many people have told me about having a nice ex…
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I'm a native English speaker and the article reads very naturally. I've been learning Spanish over the last two plus years, and I'm jealous of how regular and consistent Spanish is compared to English.
The orthography, maybe? And there are no phrasal verbs, which is nice. But you have gender, you have plenty of irregular verbs, you have a significantly more complex inflection system even for regular verbs (including the subjunctive mood and the conditional tense in the indicative), and its allophonic phonotactics are tricky (though English has a fair bit of mess here too). Zapotec sounds like it would be a lot more…
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I'm a native English speaker and the article reads very naturally. I've been learning Spanish over the last two plus years, and I'm jealous of how regular and consistent Spanish is compared to English.
Beware of misleading first impressions... :-) https://tinyview.com/itchy-feet/2022/06/02/upgrade-required