Search Results for: calc

Using Lisp

Posted on 2023-02-20 by jcs

Anurag Mendhekar has an interesting post about why he uses Lisp and thinks you should too. He uses several different Lisps—Scheme, Common Lisp, and Racket—but boils down their essence to, “An s-expression based, dynamically typed, mostly functional, call-by-value λ-calculus-based language.” … Continue reading →

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The New Luddites: The New Frontier

Posted on 2023-01-30 by jcs

The New Luddites have discovered a new frontier: Digital Minimalism. The term is actually very specific for the new Luddites. It means replacing their smartphones with a “feature phone”—a phone that does little more than make and take phone calls … Continue reading →

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A Short Essay on Reproducible Research

Posted on 2023-01-12 by jcs

As everyone around here knows, I am a big fan of reproducible research and the idea of including data, code, and explanatory text in the same file. For researchers, that makes it easy for others to verify and extend the … Continue reading →

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Counting Working Days

Posted on 2022-11-08 by jcs

Here’s a small problem to think about: how many working days are there in this month or, more generally, between any two dates? “Working days” means Monday through Friday minus holidays. It’s not a hard problem but think how you … Continue reading →

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A Formula for the nth Prime

Posted on 2022-10-11 by jcs

As some of you know, I was trained as a mathematician. I’ve always been a bit of a math nerd and read about mathematics even as a child. Long ago, probably when I was still in elementary school, I read … Continue reading →

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Unicode in AWK

Posted on 2022-08-21 by jcs

A few days ago I wrote about the excellent video of David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan discussing AWK and its history. In the video, Kernighan mentions that he’s been working on enabling Unicode in the One True AWK. Here’s a … Continue reading →

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Keeping Data and Code in the Same File

Posted on 2022-08-16 by jcs

John D. Cook has another post in his series on coding in Org-mode. The latest emphasizes how you can keep data, code, and documentation in a single (Org) file. There’s nothing new in that idea for most Irreal readers, of … Continue reading →

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Are Multiple Cursors Suboptimal?

Posted on 2022-05-03 by jcs

Over at EINVAL, Wojciech Siewierski considers multiple cursors (in Emacs) and whether it’s suboptimal. His post is entitled Multiple cursors considered… suboptimal, which seems rather provocative but the post is actually very even handed and concludes, as you’d expect, that … Continue reading →

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The Power of Emacs

Posted on 2022-04-01 by jcs

I saw this tweet by Daniel Nemenyi today: I use #emacs, not Word, for writing. It was playing up. Typing became sluggish. So I ran its profiler, typed a few lines, ran profiler-report and found a function gobbling up CPU. … Continue reading →

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Stevey’s Guided Tour of Emacs

Posted on 2022-03-12 by jcs

Steve Yegge, who is always interesting, has a nice video that he describes as a guided tour of Emacs. Yegge characterizes it as covering “roughly 12 features of Emacs, out of approximately 18 billion hillion jillion total”. If there’s an … Continue reading →

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