Author Archives: jcs

Goto

Posted on 2019-03-17 by jcs

Everyone in our field knows about Dijkstra’s famous paper Go To Statement Considered Harmful but how many have actually read the paper or know what his arguments were? Mostly we use it as a template to generate memes of the … Continue reading →

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Dealing with GitHub Pull Requests in Emacs

Posted on 2019-03-16 by jcs

Laurent Charignon has an very nice package for dealing with GitHub pull requests from within Emacs. His package, github-review, allows you to retrieve the pull request from GitHub and deal with it entirely within Emacs. You can even work off-line … Continue reading →

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How and Why To Normalize Unicode

Posted on 2019-03-15 by jcs

From the excellent TeX Tip twitter feed, I found a pointer to an excellent article by Alessandro Segala concerning something I didn’t know much about and that many Irreal readers might not know about either: how and why to normalize … Continue reading →

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EmacsCast #8: Writing

Posted on 2019-03-14 by jcs

Rakhim Davletkaliyev is back with another episode of his Emacs podcast, EmacsCast. This time he presents part one of a two-part series on writing in Emacs and Org mode. My first thought as I started to listen to the podcast … Continue reading →

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An Afterword on Being Almost There

Posted on 2019-03-13 by jcs

In a comment to my recent post on achieving a digital life, Zarniwoop asks about the risks of putting all my eggs in one basket if everything I need for everyday carry is on my iPhone. That’s a question I … Continue reading →

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A History of the Development of C

Posted on 2019-03-12 by jcs

Someone posted a pointer to an old (1994) paper of Dennis Ritchie on the development of the C language. I haven’t read it in years and it was interesting to revisit it. The paper, along with several others describing aspects … Continue reading →

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Almost There

Posted on 2019-03-11 by jcs

As regular readers know, I try to live the digital life as much as I can. By “digital life” I mean eschewing paper and paper processes and running as much of my life as possible with my phone and computers. … Continue reading →

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Guess What Day It Is

Posted on 2019-03-10 by jcs

No, not hump day. It’s the 46th anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd’s iconic Dark Side of the Moon. As I do every year on this date, I’d like to say, “Happy Birthday” to one of the greatest and … Continue reading →

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Zamansky: A Quick Review of Editors

Posted on 2019-03-09 by jcs

Mike Zamansky posted a quick review of programming editors and IDEs. It’s actually intended to be about picking a Java Editor/IDE in support of Java programming courses for teachers but it’s more generally useful. Zamansky, of course, is an Emacs … Continue reading →

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Texting and Line Editing

Posted on 2019-03-08 by jcs

In the past, I’ve written disparagingly about line editing as practiced with the ed editor. That’s not to say that ed isn’t a great editor or that it doesn’t have its uses even today, just that no one (in their … Continue reading →

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