Category Archives: General

Algol 68, Pascal, C, and All That

Posted on 2020-10-27 by jcs

Apropos of nothing, here’s a really nice short video by Professor David Brailsford of The University of Nottingham about the days when Algol 68 and Pascal were in contention for the language to be taught in various computer courses. Some … Continue reading →

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Orgmode.org Has a New Look

Posted on 2020-10-26 by jcs

Just a quickie today to note that the Org-mode site, orgmode.org, has a brand new look. That’s thanks to the work of Tecosaur who completely revamped the site. According to his announcement over at Reddit, the core pages are smaller … Continue reading →

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The Danger of Web Forums

Posted on 2020-10-25 by jcs

Karl Voit has an interesting diatribe on his Web site that really resonated with me. The TL;DR is that you shouldn’t commit anything relevant to Web forums like Reddit, Hacker News, or Facebook. What Voit terms as “relevant,” I would … Continue reading →

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Zamansky 76: Bookmarks and Burly

Posted on 2020-10-24 by jcs

Mike Zamansky is back with another video in his Using Emacs Series. This time he discusses Emacs bookmarks and the Burly package. You can set a bookmark for any file that you need often and use the bookmark-jump function to … Continue reading →

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You Are Not Expected to Understand This Redux

Posted on 2020-10-23 by jcs

Three and a half years ago, I wrote about what is arguably the most famous comment in computer history. That, of course, is the celebrated “You are not expected to understand this” comment in the V6 Unix source code. The … Continue reading →

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A New Organ?

Posted on 2020-10-22 by jcs

If you’re like me, you probably think that medical science has long since identified all the organs in the human body. Indeed, no new human organs have been identified for about 300 years. Until now. The New York Times is … Continue reading →

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Hardware vs. Software

Posted on 2020-10-21 by jcs

Everyone who’s been around for a while recognizes that computing has gotten more powerful. Problems that were once intractable now seem almost trivial. It’s not really surprising; it’s progress. It’s what we expect. But it does suggest the question: is … Continue reading →

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The Wizard Book Cover Explained

Posted on 2020-10-20 by jcs

A lot of you probably know that Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, SICP, is also called “The Wizard Book.” A glace at its cover explains the alternate name but Conor Hoekstra has a more thorough explanation of the cover: … Continue reading →

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Programmatic Programming with Graphviz

Posted on 2020-10-19 by jcs

Correl Roush has a very nice post that beautifully illustrates the idea of writing code to write code. It’s a tremendously powerful idea because it lets you leverage some other program or programming language to do a task that requires … Continue reading →

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Emacs Shells

Posted on 2020-10-18 by jcs

One of the things that’s harder than it should be in Emacs is embedded shells. You can type Meta+x shell and sort of have a shell. Except it doesn’t work very well. There are other options but it can be … Continue reading →

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