Monthly Archives: June 2018

Org Mode is Awesome

Posted on 2018-06-10 by jcs

I’ve written about John Kitchin’s Org mode is awesome video before (back in 2014) but recently Xah Lee tweeted about it and I watched it again. It’s a great video and worth mentioning again for anyone who hasn’t already seen … Continue reading →

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Mastering Emacs on 26.1

Posted on 2018-06-09 by jcs

Most everyone knows that you should read the NEWS file when you install a new version of Emacs. There is always a lot of new functionality and other changes that you almost certainly don’t know about. If you’re like me, … Continue reading →

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Emacs for Vim Users

Posted on 2018-06-08 by jcs

As I’ve said before, engineers may switch between Emacs and Vim but they seldom switch from Emacs or Vim to another editor. Sure, you see folks try out the newest shiny thing—VS Code is the latest example—but somehow they always … Continue reading →

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JWZ on Microsoft Acquiring GitHub

Posted on 2018-06-07 by jcs

There’s been a lot of chatter among the developer class about Microsoft acquiring GitHub. Most of it involves how and where to migrate repositories currently residing on GitHub. Jamie Zawinski, for one, has no sympathy for developers who are suddenly … Continue reading →

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Tech Addiction is Not Real

Posted on 2018-06-06 by jcs

I’ve written a couple of times about the silliness that goes by the name of “tech addiction.” It’s the notion that we—and especially our children—misuse our technology and have become addicted to it. Anyone with a modicum of common sense … Continue reading →

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Python for Lisp Programmers

Posted on 2018-06-05 by jcs

Back in 2000, Peter Norvig was getting complaints that the code in his and Stuart Russell’s book, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach was in Lisp, that many of the students using the book didn’t know Lisp, and that they didn’t … Continue reading →

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Video: How WeChat and Alipay Dominates Chinese Life

Posted on 2018-06-04 by jcs

I’ve written several times (1, 2, 3, 4) about how China has embraced the digital life and use their smartphones for everything from paying for lunch to interacting with the government. This is made possible largely by the WeChat and … Continue reading →

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A Thesaurus for Emacs

Posted on 2018-06-03 by jcs

If you do your writing with Emacs rather than a “word processor,” you may have found yourself wanting an easy-to-use thesaurus that is integrated with Emacs. Even if you subscribe to John McPhee’s Draft #4 advice and mostly use a … Continue reading →

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Emacs 26, Threads, and Generators

Posted on 2018-06-02 by jcs

One of the things that a lot of people are exited about in Emacs 26 is the introduction of basic threading. Another, less mentioned, feature is generators. The excellent Chris Wellons has a must-read post that talks about both of … Continue reading →

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Recursion

Posted on 2018-06-01 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has an interesting post on recursion. The question at hand is whether it makes sense to teach recursion to beginning programming students. Zamansky was a high school CS teacher for many years and now he’s involved—at least in … Continue reading →

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