Category Archives: Programming

Keyboards for Emacs

Posted on 2020-11-30 by jcs

One of the most important pieces of kit in our arsenal is the keyboard. It’s easy to treat them as an afterthought but if you do a lot of typing as most of us do, the choice can mean the … Continue reading →

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Selective Display

Posted on 2020-06-28 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a post that reminds me of a useful command that I always forget about: selective-display. Borkowski uses it to make working with some large JSON files easier. Take a look at his post for the details. … Continue reading →

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Comments on the Usefulness of Emacs for Scientists

Posted on 2020-05-01 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subredit, gmu_nu says he’s a graduate student in Physics and wonders about the usefulness of Emacs for scientists who aren’t in CS. The resulting comments are an interesting compendium of the ways that scientists make use … Continue reading →

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In Praise of C

Posted on 2020-01-02 by jcs

I’ve been lucky to spend almost my entire career working in C. These days, I do more Lisp but for many years, C put bread on the table. Like all earthly things, C is starting to suffer a decline in … Continue reading →

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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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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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Some Wisdom on Pipelines

Posted on 2019-03-03 by jcs

Over at his blog, Ted Dziuba has posted a valuable piece of wisdom that is easy to forget. The TL;DR on the wisdom is that many tasks for which we instinctively turn to heavy-weight, distributed tools are more easily and … Continue reading →

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Moving from C++ to C

Posted on 2019-01-10 by jcs

I’ve written before about not being a fan of C++. I know it’s an unpopular opinion but I think it’s a terrible language that removed most useful aspects of C while keeping C’s problems. Partly, I suppose, that’s because I’m … Continue reading →

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Emacs for R Programming

Posted on 2018-12-26 by jcs

Although I’ve played around with it a bit and even written a few blog posts about it, I’m not really an R user and barely rise to the dilettante level. andyptt21 over at The Scientific Shrimper is an R user … Continue reading →

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Implementing Strings

Posted on 2018-11-05 by jcs

Andreas Zwinkau has a very nice article on strings and how to implement them. If you’re a C programmer, your first reaction might be, “Meh. They’re an array of bytes. What’s to implement?” If you’re, say, a Python programmer, you … Continue reading →

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