Tag Archives: Tech

Racket and SICP

As I’ve written—seemingly hundreds of times—I’m a huge fan of Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). In my opinion, it is one of the best—arguably the best—books on Computer Science. I read it relatively late in … Continue reading

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Pike’s Rules Of Programming

I may have mentioned this before but someone recently posted Rob Pike’s 5 Rules of Programming. The rules are simple and beautiful, almost obvious, but very often ignored. The five rules can be condensed into three principles: Your intuition stinks. … Continue reading

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The History of Vi, Vim, and Other Vi Clones

Those of you who have been around Irreal for a while know that I never enlisted in the Vi/Emacs wars. Indeed, I have decades of experience with both and hold each in the highest regard. For a long time now, … Continue reading

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Running Unix v6

There are lots of people who enjoy the opportunity to experience what it was like to work on early Unix systems. That’s been possible for a long time. Indeed, there’s a cottage industry of experimenters who have built PDP emulators, … Continue reading

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The ed Video

After yesterday’s post on Thompson’s famous hack, I watched the video of Thompson’s talk at this year’s Southern California Linux Expo that Cox mentioned. That was pretty interesting as another example of Thompson’s curiosity and genius but the point for … Continue reading

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How The Thompson Hack Worked

Every year or so I revisit and write about Ken Thompson’s 1983 Turing Award lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust. It’s one of those papers that should be read every year: it seems there’s always something new to learn. The paper … Continue reading

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Five Shell One Liners

Perhaps I’m just old fashioned and pining for the old days. Or perhaps I’m anticipating the time when I can finally wave my cane at all those pesky kids. Whatever the case, I do believe that avoiding the command line—or … Continue reading

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Vimari

Back in August, I wrote about my quest to minimize mouse usage as much as possible. That’s easy in Emacs where my mouse usage is essentially zero. It’s a bit harder when navigating between apps and performing various system duties … Continue reading

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Exploratory Data Analysis With AWK

This post is about Brian Kernighan and AWK, two things always worth hearing about. All of you, I’m sure, know that after retiring from Bell Labs, Kernighan took a professorship at his Alma Mater, Princeton. Since he’s been there, Kernighan … Continue reading

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New AWK Book

Long time Irreal readers know that I’m a fan of the AWK language. Whatever OS you’re using, AWK is sure to be available. It’s installed by default on all Unix/Linux systems and may be on Windows as well. Linux systems … Continue reading

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