To people in the #lisp #emacs #programming space, I'm currently trying to get into learning Lisp as a programming language (as a hobby). My work mainly involves knowing python but like many people in physics, writing good code is never quite taught to us.

I would like to learn Lisp primarily out of interest but also it would benefit me iif the structure of Lisp itself would teach me good programming practices that I could use when writing python.

Keeping this in mind, are there any Lisp dialect recommendations? I've heard good things about Common lisp and Clojure, but would be interested if those (or any other dialect) would serve my purpose.

#CommonLisp #Scheme #Clojure #Lisp #coding

Gamer+ Events

Chat with DJ Hairy Larry on Gamer+, Saturday night at 10:00 CDT, while we listen to Something Blue.

Every day, tob's Dubious Goals Committee is at 2:30 PM CDT. Something Blue follows Fridays at 3:00 PM CDT. MixRemix Creative Commons Jazz follows Mondays at 3:00 PM CDT.

Enjoy The Lispy, Gopher, Climate Show at zero hundred hours UTC each Wednesday. A
programming show with a focus on lisp and climate change.

Links in part 2

#events #Gamer+ #music #programming #gaming #ttrpgs

C3 0.8.3 Feature flags https://lobste.rs/s/e9v9qi #programming #release
https://c3-lang.org/blog/c3_0_8_3_feature_flags/

When I first got to know the #Z notation #formal method in the early 1980s, I was very impressed. In those days, imperative languages like C and Pascal ruled the industrial landscape, and pen-and-paper #programming was still an accepted, nay expected, practice. The Z notation and its emphasis on proof obligations fit well with that paper-borne process of specification and design.

Not long after, I got to know #ML and its Hindley-Milner type system. Thereafter, I was no longer impressed with Z's use of an overtly ceremonial and verbose syntax to describe what I could write just one expression in ML.

This superiority of #FP syntax over Z's bloated notation is even more evident in modern descendants of ML, such as Standard ML, OCaml, Haskell, Agda, Idris, Coq, and Lean.

Var Zero on how naming things and focusing on the intent of code helps uncover problematic design and abstraction issues.

What I mean is simpler: be mindful of the intent of the code.

https://var0.xyz/posts/mindful-coding-purpose-and-intention.html

#programming #SoftwareDesign

yesterday's mail included vol 4 of Dr Dobb's Journal - a kind of legendary programming and hardware guide of the 70s and 80s that I sadly was too young to find in the flesh as a kid

it took a few years to find this volume, and i'm elated that it is just as witty, fascinating and joyful as its reputation implies. each volume is a collection of previous issues of the journal - this one includes issues 31-40, all from 1979. it's heavy with zilog Z80 related programming, since that was the most popular (and cheap) consumer-hacker cpu in that period, as well as stuff for CP/M and the motorola 6800, MOS 6502, and Pascal.

to be honest, i'm not used to reading such helpful and insightful tips from other computer enthusiasts. there are no replyguys here - just fellow nerds excited about a new technique they want to share with others. this seems like an important lesson for now more than ever.

there are no religious wars over the One True Language or sniping over brands. just a bunch of folks just glad to find out that others are as excited as they are about generating prime numbers and Tiny BASIC.

the editor's preface does such a great job of relating the friendly tone of the journal that i've included it here.

(besides - Running Light with No Overbyte has only become more important in light of recent computing history.)

#retrocomputing #programming

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The front page of Dr Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia: Running Light Without Overbyte. A reference journal for Users of home computers, volume four, by the people's computer company.

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Editor's Preface: And where will it lead? That was the question posed in Dr. Dobb's Journal, Volume Ill. It was a time when a body of microprocessor knowledge had been accumulated, but the number of persons with access to and understanding of that knowledge was extremely small. Manufacturing techniques were being perfected, but costs were still high. The bandwagon was rolling, but no one was holding the reins. At least, that's the way it appeared. Dr. Dobb's Journal was born in a time of chaos. Some fantastic new machines had been bred in basement test tubes. The problem was how to optimize their potential? Then a handful of radical-thinking idealists produced Tiny BASIC and a publication in which to communicate the good news. More good things have been cropping up since then, and now the magazine serves as a broad forum for the micro community. To answer the original question, the revolution in microcomputing will lead where- ever we direct it. In the beginning, when there was very little momentum to the personal computing movement, a handful of movers and shakers could do most of the guiding. They saw to it that the power of small computers would indeed rest in the hands of indi- viduals instead of with corporations or government. The movement has, of course, gained gigantic proportions as more and more people have begun to grasp its significance and to reap its benefits. With its present inertial force, many more guiding hands are needed to keep it on track, to preserve the original dream. Dr. Dobb's Journal has kept pace by opening its pages to new authors, more free thinkers and quiding lights. The proliferation of hardware and software has required that we grow to meet the challenge presented by our own idealism. In order to keep alive the concept of personal computing power, we must not only keep stride with technology, we must shape the fu- ture. We must be in the forefront, developing systems tools and refining the programming languages, tecnniques and very concepts which will influence what small computers will be able to do, and for whom. Lest we become too grandiose, too filled with the importance of our mission, we have Doc Dobb's humbling influence. Always ready with a bit of irony and keen wit, Doc sees to it that the pages of his journal remain open as a forum and that they do not become a soapbox dominated by any particular group or prejudice. His philosophical outlook is often expressed in such homilies as "Let a thousand lilies bloom . it's grist for the mill, we'll grind it." That view is tempered by another of Doc's sayings, "The quick brown fox keeps his tail out of the lazy dog's mouth." That is Doc's way of reminding us not to be influenced by any special interests. Its broad, objective approach has enabled Dr. Dobb's Journal to serve the world as the lead- ing publication in its field. But more than a publication, it is a style of thinking which makes technology work for humans - and not the other way around. Marlin Ouverson Editor

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A letter to the journal: CONSERVING MEMORY WITH THE HUFFMAN CODE Dear Dr. Dobb's: If you really want to conserve memory . .. here are some ideas borrowed from Information Theory to allow English language text to be stored very efficiently. It is an alternative to the word-storage schemes proposed by Klaus Holtz in DDI #33 and by Gordon Wilk in his DDJ #36 letter. It's called a Huttman code. Til describe the encoding method on a small. hvpothetical alphabet rather than work with the entire ASCII set. Suppose we wanted to store some text in the FERPOE language, which uses only the letters A, B, C, D, and E. We know that standard FERPOE contains the following distribu- tion of letter frequencies: Letter Probability A .37 B .25 C .20 D .11 E .07 Instead of devoting eight or even three bits to each of these characters in our computer encoding, it 1s more eltiCient to use fewer bits on the more trequent characters (e.g., A) Morse code does this. But how do you decide how many bits to use for each character? There's a simple algorithm which finds the best combination: You write down the probablities in a roW, and grow Tree by performing the following iteration until there 1s only one number in vour current row. Iteration: copy the previous IOW, onv remove the two smallest numbers rom the roW, and write their sum in their place. For our FERPOE example, the tree looks like this:

I'm done using AI – Brett Codes

https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/

> Why I'm stopping using AI for coding (and anything else) after using it earnestly for a year and coming to understand the harms it causes on personal, societal, and environmental levels.

#technology #programming #webdev #gamedev

most cursed Mac thing you've heard all day, a midi file dispatched to the four-tone synth of the Macintosh Sound Driver

#macintosh #programming #clanguage

There is utility w/ NLTK or spaCy to really get better understanding of code

I'm looking to connect with other developers who are interested in how to apply spacy for analysis on code material.

#programming #analysis #nltk #spaCy #python #languagetoolkids

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<) Sentiment & Dependency «4 Word Cloud #8 Readability #4 POS Table [¥ Quality Score $¥ Patterns > Include categories Matches Pattern types Text matched 73 p 10.0% = Domain = File Path Domain File Path

Gamer+ Events

Chat with DJ Hairy Larry on Gamer+, Saturday night at 10:00 CDT, while we listen to Something Blue.

Every day, tob's Dubious Goals Committee is at 2:30 PM CDT. Something Blue follows Fridays at 3:00 PM CDT. MixRemix Creative Commons Jazz follows Mondays at 3:00 PM CDT.

Enjoy The Lispy, Gopher, Climate Show at zero hundred hours UTC each Wednesday. A
programming show with a focus on lisp and climate change.

Links in part 2

#events #Gamer+ #music #programming #gaming #ttrpgs

New #blog #post: My Failed Tech Predictions

https://rldane.space/my-failed-tech-predictions.html

1637 words

cc: my wonderful #chorus: @joel @dm @sotolf @thedoctor @pixx @orbitalmartian @adamsdesk @krafter @roguefoam @clayton @giantspacesquid @Twizzay @stfn

(I will happily add/remove you from the chorus upon request! :)

#rlDaneWriting #blost #computing #phones #smartphones #enpoopification #retrocomputing #programming #slop #MacOS #Macintosh #data #InformationAge #SCSI #Mobile #TuringTest #LLM #LLMs #ChatBots

The Fediverse is overflowing with incredible artists, engineers, designers, photographers, and brilliant minds in academia. With the job market on fire globally, let's make a habit of hiring from within our own community, please 🎨📚

Need a designer for a project? A photographer? A researcher? Post your gigs here. Let's create a close-knit support system to help fellow people weather the storm.

If you are hiring: look here first. Post your short-term gigs, full-time roles, and freelance contracts. Give people here a chance.

If you are looking: share your work, follow the hashtags, and connect. Let's take care of each other.

#FediHire #GetFediHired #Academia #MastoArt #art #Photography #Freelance #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #photography

There are many cases of end users who are totally ignorant in LLM use cases

I've been able to educate one with success

When she realized that before her one query

• many megawatts were used to create the training regimen of the model
• Peta Bytes of copyrighted information was blatantly stolen without regard to ownership
• in turn sold for profit to companies
• while getting end users addicted to using them

...She realized what Destruction she was causing, on a Global Scale because she knows personally what Global Warming does in her Area of the Country were flooding regularly occurs due to Climate Shifts

@rl_dane

#LLM #slop #hallucinations #AI #programming #coding #weather #climate #change

Gamer+ Events

part 1

Chat with DJ Hairy Larry every Saturday night at 10:00 CDT. Join the open music chat on Gamer+ while we listen to Something Blue.

Every day it's tob's Dubious Goals Committee at 2:30 PM CDT. Something Blue follows on Fridays at 3:00 PM CDT. MixRemix Creative Commons Jazz follows on Mondays at 3:00 PM CDT.

Listen at anonradio.net. Join sdf.org for free to join the DJ chat.

#events #Gamer+ #music #programming #gaming #ttrpgs

Programming used to be a mathematical act. But that has not been so for some decades, not since release cycles shrank from once every two years down to inhumanely short intervals. It now appears that mathematics, and indeed creativity, has no place in modern high-frequency CI/CD CRUD-grinding.

But even in this #AI Slop Age, life-critical #engineering work still demands #mathematical reasoning and #professional guarantees, under law. Software now plays a central role in this type of work. And software frailties have reached epidemic levels, from operating system kernels, device drivers, and up. Hence, #verified #programming has become an urgent necessity.

By “verified”, I mean not post hoc but ab initio verification, at every stage of the process: requirements analysis, specifications as propositions, computer assisted proofs, design synthesis, deterministic code transformation.

Many #IT software practitioners maintain that they neither know nor care about mathematics, and that they cannot afford mathematical frolics when there are profits to be reaped.

That economic argument is, at best, weak, in the modern, tightly integrated society, where the full cost of software failures is incalculable. Even amongst ordinary, but essential, business applications that cannot harm life and limb, a propagating cascade failure now has the potential to collapse the global economy, in an instant.

Be that as it may, such economic objections have no force at all against the legally mandated safety requirements of life-critical applications.

Finally got all of the GPT and MBR code put together, most of the bugs fixed, and released it as a downloadable Linux binary. Does a pretty good job of reading the data and giving out way too much information regarding the MBR and/or GUID partition table.

Available here: https://git.jamesthebard.net/jweatherly/driveinfo

#programming #gpt #mbr #golang #linux

Teaching Kids Forth https://gracefulliberty.com/articles/teaching-kids-forth/

#forth #forthlang #programming

Tolkien‘s linguistic inventions are startlingly creative. In ordinary story telling, invented languages rarely appear, and if they do, they are just superficial props. But each of Tolkien‘s languages is complete—dare I say, “Turing complete”—equipped with its own origin story, evolutionary history, regional dialects, cultural functions, fully formed script, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, idioms.

#Tolkien’s originality, ingenuity, thoroughness, industry, and process could serve as inspirations in designing new #programming languages. We still stand to gain much, even if we #IT practitioners do no more than to look upon Tolkien’s life work as mere aspirations.

Modern computing began when models of computability were invented in the mid 1930s, by mathematicians, like Turing, Church, Kleene, et al. Within a decade, first commercial computers, designed by engineers from top academic institutions, were being sold. Within two decades, high-level programming languages FORTRAN, LISP, COBOL, and ALGOL emerged, also created by academics.

Today, though, the majority of software systems are now being cobbled together by those who know nothing of, and care even less of, the foundational #mathematics of computing—using #AI, but of course. Somewhere along the way, modern #software practices diverged from traditional #engineering practice.

That bifurcation point was when the once-united "computing team" splintered into architect (EE), algorithmist (CS), programmer (CS), coder (IT), operator (IT), etc. It was also at this point in time when the first commercial computers and early high-level #programming languages emerged.

Gamer+ Events

part 1

Chat with DJ Hairy Larry every Saturday night at 10:00 CDT. Join the open music chat on Gamer+ while we listen to Something Blue.

Every day it's tob's Dubious Goals Committee at 2:30 PM CDT. Something Blue follows on Fridays at 3:00 PM CDT. MixRemix Creative Commons Jazz follows on Mondays at 3:00 PM CDT.

Listen at anonradio.net. Join sdf.org for free to join the DJ chat.

#events #Gamer+ #music #programming #gaming #ttrpgs

ohhh this is just fascinating. it turns out that A Fool's Errand (a very eclectic tarot-themed puzzle game for the mac) by cliff johnson got a sequel 25 years later, called A Fool and His Money.

the sequel was built in Adobe (Macromedia) Director (!) of all things, and required a serial number/key file after 90 days, which you could only buy by emailing cliff and receiving a zipped keyfile

cliff stopped selling the game a few years later, and it completely disappeared.

out of pure frustration, Renzo Pigliacampo decompiled the compiled Director projector, and reassembled a working Director project out of it.

he does a great job of explaining the process of writing a keygen for a 10+ year old game here. it warms my heart to see Lingo code again after decades 😻

https://renzopigliacampo.medium.com/the-fool-and-his-money-making-a-keygen-for-a-commercial-shockwave-game-eb6daf135b8b

#programming #macromedia #macintosh

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A screenshot from the game A Fool and his Money. It shows a priest or knight of some kind atop a medieval horse. A castle is in the background, along with a medieval style sun. It is painted in a rainbow of colours.

By Github PRs and Stars:

Python, Typescript, Rust. 📈

Anything below C is in the noise or in decline.

Lean, Zig, Odin, Mojo are some growing in that noise. 🙈

#programming #programminglanguages

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Programming languages ranking on Github. Shows Python, Typescript, and Rust increasing in use. C and C++ as flatlining, and most are in decline other than a few stragglers like Lean, Zig, Odin, System Verilog, Mojo that make up the noise in the graph compared to the other languages.

Someone’s favourite #programming language can be likened to a knife. It could be a well made, but common, Swiss Army knife, or it could be a well made, and pricey, high carbon steel santoku hand forged by the last remaining blade master in Seki, Gifu Prefecture, whose ironworks date back centuries.

A knife user would not think of using his favourite knife, whichever type, to clean the toilet, to dig a trench, or to perform some other task for which the knife was not designed. And although he would use his favourite santoku in the kitchen daily, he would only pocket his SAK on a camping trip. The SAK is as generally applicable as a knife can be, but even this estimable knife has its limits.

Likewise, a programmer should select a #programming language that best fits a particular task. There is no such thing as the definitive GPL for all occasions. Every GPL is designed for a particular purpose with a particular axe to grind. A GPL is but a Turing-complete DSL in disguise.

It, therefore, behoves the programmer to learn, over the course of his career, as many languages from as many paradigms as practicable.

The ML family of #FP #programming languages—both eager (ML, SML, Caml, OCaml, F#, Reason, Idris, …) and lazy (Hope, Miranda, Haskell, Agda, …) varieties—are arguably the most ergonomic to use for offline system programming and for compiler implementation. SML and Haskell dominate amongst the #CS academic research language implementations, and OCaml amongst the #IT industrial strength language implementations.

Also, nearly every language that has become popular in IT since the early 2000s (Scala, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, Python 3, Mojo, Elm, Grain, Moonbit, …) has wholesale adopted ML’s type system and language constructs. Yet, the ML family remains unknown in the industry, and its direct influence upon all modern languages gone unacknowledged. Even OCaml and Haskell, despite their industry-wide notoriety, had somehow escaped broad adoption.

This situation is unfortunate, because the ML family of languages all have the unique ability to transform an average user into an effective theoretical thinker and an efficient practical doer.

pfft trying to figure out how to keep my skills sharp in these days where I'm mostly paid to boil the oceans managing a fleet of clanks, considering various languages I'd work in if I got to choose, circling around the idea of a project, wondering: is there a DICOM library for Haskell? Yes there is, and I'm a maintainer. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dicom (for what it's worth, it's not nearly mature enough to be useful) #programming #haskell

You are a computer scientist working in interpretable machine learning. How did you end up working with the police to solve crimes?

Find out in #ACMBytecast episode 86, where host Rashmi Mohan interviews 2025 #ACMFellow Cynthia Rudin, a professor at Duke University.

#machinelearning #programming #innovation #tech

The hardest thing in Dylan or any 🫰quote "normal" unquote🫰lang, is writing algebraic math when you're used to RPN or sexpr. Why am I putting one argument before the operator, the other randomly after, and having to figure out which ones happen first? Do people DO MATH like this‽

In theory I could just use +(a, b) (or does it need \+(a, b)? I'd try that in REPL but there isn't one).

#DylanLang #lisp #scheme #programming #math

Helix is a free, open-source code editor written in Rust with Vim-style modal editing, built-in LSP support, Tree-sitter syntax highlighting, and multiple cursors, no complex plugin setup required.

A fast, privacy-friendly editor for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

More details: https://digitalescapetools.com/tools/tool.html?id=helix

#OpenSource #Programming #Rust #CodeEditor #Linux #Privacy

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Screenshot of the Helix project page showing the Helix logo, release and build badges, contributor count, and an editor preview demonstrating split-pane code editing with documentation popups.