bobochan

I miss the other direction, being able to put shortcuts (aliases) in your Apple menu. When OS X was still young there used to be a "haxes" called Fruit Menu that let you do that, but I think that has been gone for a while.

There are probably some menu bar items that I do not know about, but I really miss that functionality.

I have not found it especially useful on my MBP, but it is a huge improvement for me on the iPad with keyboard and mouse. It feels much more natural now to have two windows open and quickly switch between apps. I used my iPad for about 80% of my work now, up from 10-15%.

This is so completely random, and not really code related, but it was huge at the time (circa 1990). I was compiling large bibliographies of research documents for NSF that eventually had to be read into Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS for printing. We had written a very complex system of WP macros to search for tags that we programmatically put in the file, but they took forever to run and would often crash. My colleague and I found that we could only use search/replace to send begin/end pairs of tags for any formatting code (e.g. bold, italics). However, if we replaced the closing tags first, then the opening one, WP would notice that there were pairs of empty tags and get rid of the extra closing tag so that the underlying text would be formatted properly.

We were doing this everyday, so it cut the processing time from many hours to seconds. We swore each other to secrecy about this development and marched off to Dunkin’ Donuts with our giant ice coffee belt-loop holsters to celebrate.

I also like FPM and the ecosystem. In case anyone is just getting started with Fortran, definitely checkout the Fortran Standard Library project:

https://github.com/fortran-lang/stdlib

Tremendous! One of my first tasks with QuickBasic 4.5 was writing an AKAC-874 code generator (for training purposes only) for some Marines at the embassy where I was stationed. It seemed the least that I could do considering they kept me fed with Grade A burgers direct from the States.

Great. Thanks so much for following up. This is a great project and I am definitely looking forward to trying it and learning more.

Hi, sorry for the delay, I wanted to do a clean install of sbcl and quicklisp just to double check. I was having trouble getting the plotting code to work, so I cloned Lisp-Stat/plot and tried to follow the instructions:

* (asdf:clear-source-registry)

* (asdf:load-system :plot/vglt)

The error message was:

debugger invoked on a LOAD-SYSTEM-DEFINITION-ERROR in thread #<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {1004BF80A3}>: Error while trying to load definition for system plot from pathname /Users/bobochan/common-lisp/plot/plot.asd: READ error during LOAD: The file #P"/Users/bobochan/common-lisp/plot/description.text" does not exist: No such file or directory(in form starting at line: 4, column: 0, position: 147)

The folder contents are:

 ~/common-lisp/plot/ [master] ls -1

CONTRIBUTING.md

docs/

LICENSE

plot.asd

README.md

src/

tests/

I gave this a try but still ran into issues. First it was a missing file, description.text, so I created a temporary one, but have not been able to figure it out after going through all of the different possibilities on the web site and github.

I am going to keep an eye on this project because I would really like to be able to work on this. Hopefully updates in a month or so will get things in sync.

Glad it is not just me. I did a clean install and follow the examples on the web site step by step:

debugger invoked on a QUICKLISP-CLIENT:SYSTEM-NOT-FOUND in thread #<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {1004BF80A3}>: System "plot/vega" not found

For me it was strictly personal use. For example, I made a series of maps for stadiums for teams in the EFL Championship to use as wallpaper when my club has away matches. I also made some for my hometown and for the universities where my kids are studying.

I played around with this library a few months ago and it is an absolute joy to use if you like maps.

One of my favorite sports memories was going to my son's first big cross-country running meet. There were hundreds of kids lined up for the race and parents lined the course to cheer them on. The crowds clapped loudly for the leaders, it died down for the long stretch of mid-pack runners, and then grew to a roar for the kids working their hardest at the back of the pack. Everyone there seemed to understand how hard it is to get started in endurance sports, but also how transformative they can be to a kid's confidence, especially if they have not felt welcome or successful in team sports.

If you are open to a broader score of university work then you might consider connecting with the Research Software Engineer Associations in the countries that you would consider working in. They have a lot of networking discussions over Slack. In the US the URL is:

https://us-rse.org/

I have been at a university for 25 years and absolutely love it. I have a staff position as a research software engineer, but also a non-tenure faculty appointment where I teach classes and work with students. It has really been a best of all worlds combination where I love the work and avoid a lot of the stress and committee work.

The most important anecdote that I can tell from the early 1980s is how optimistic we all were. My dad was an engineer and helped take the lead on fundraising to buy Apple ][+ computers for the school classrooms in our town. He used to earnestly tell everyone that he met that my generation would be the last one to go through a curriculum where programming was not a core skill. He imagined a world where everyone would understand how to code.

He passed away before the realization set in that "computer skills" were going to be defined as word processing and spreadsheets rather than programming, and I think he would be very disappointed in our current trajectory.

My memory is that MS laughed because they did not believe the hype. The laughing stopped when they got the first iPhones in house and were able to see how much space Apple was able to dedicate to the battery.

I had a similar path to nano. Pico was the default editor for the Pine email client, and I still use Alpine for work decades later. I am generally an emacs user, but nano / pico definitely feel familiar and comfortable.

I was in Central Africa (CAR and Chad) in the early 90s and shortwave was a lifeline. The BBC was on in the background almost all day, with the exception of switching to the VOA once in a while to check on sports scores. Beyond news, shortwave was how things like evacuation and security reports were shared.

My shortwave broke in transit home, but I picked up a new one around 2000, just in time for the BBC to end its broadcasts to North America. That really signaled the beginning of the end as other broadcasters cut back or eliminated their broadcasts.

I can't believe WRJ came up on HN. But, where are you seeing that? WRJ only has one zip code (that I know of), 05001.

WRJ (population between 2,000-3,000) is not only smaller than Cleveland, it is not actually a town. WRJ is a village of the town of Hartford, VT and probably would not be known at all without the railroad station.

Found it: WRJ mail sorting plant is a "sectional center facility" for a lot of NH and VT.

A destination sectional center facility (SCF) is a processing and distribution center (P&DC) of the United States Postal Service (USPS) that serves a designated geographical area defined by one or more three-digit ZIP Code prefixes. A sectional center facility routes mail between local post offices and to and from network distribution centers (NDCs) and Surface Transfer Centers (STCs), which form the backbone of the network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectional_center_facility

Dartmouth celebrated the 50th anniversary of BASIC a few years ago and they were pretty consistent in keeping it all upper case.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basic.html

True BASIC, a company that Kemeny and Kurtz founded in 1983, is all upper case too.

https://www.truebasic.com/about

French instruction starts very early in our town in Vermont because there are over 8 million French speakers right next to us, including almost 2 million living right over the border in Montréal. The ability to communicate in French has been incredibly useful over the course of my career, not just in North America, but across Europe and Africa. There are 29 countries that speak French as an official language and about 274 million fluent speakers.

Yes, if you read the first Dartmouth BASIC documentation you immediately understand that Kurtz and Kemeny were designing a language that students could teach themselves, with the goal of them being able to transition to Fortran.

I had an SE/30! It was a big upgrade from my Mac Plus, even with the external floppy drive, because I could finally compile Pascal code without having to swap discs. All of this was a HUGE upgrade from my //e with only one drive where I had to swap floppies for Apple Pascal constantly.

The SE/30 was a seriously useful computer and a ridiculously fun machine to use every day.

This is probably a "me problem," but I have had a hard time moving beyond the tutorials to actually getting work done. For example, I am working on a project right now where I would typically use a dict of dicts in python and then use map functions so that I can process the keys in parallel. When coming to python from perl, ruby, and c++ I found that I already had a pretty good intuition about how this would work.

I read the documentation, but could not make as much sense of it as I should. I searched online for example and found a few hits on the question, but not nearly as many as I would in other languages, and if there were answers then they were often marked "wrong," or I could not get them to work with my code.

After a lot of searching and trial and error I finally got that working, then started looking into how to run this on multiple nodes and processors and got completely lost.

I am sure the documentation is there and that I could do a better job figuring it out. I am also sure Julia would be a great match for the type of work that I do, and I am going to keep trying. But from what I have seen so far it feels like the pain of trying to migrate from Python to Julia is pretty difficult to justify.

Almost up to 365 days on Duolingo: French, German, Italian.

I just re-read Xah's notes and all of that rings a bell, but off of comp.lang.lisp Erik could be incredibly kind in helping other programmers. I was working my way through an early edition of _A programmer's guide to Common Lisp_ by Deborah Tatar and got absolutely stumped on the chapter on macros. Erik worked with me over email until we actually found what appeared to be a typo in the example source code and was incredibly patient with my dumb mistakes.

Exactly. I still have a //e on my desk and learned how to use VisiCalc because a high school friend's dad was an exec at Symbolics and we would swap back and forth between playing games and trying to figure out cool things to do with spreadsheets.

I swore I would never leave my Apple //e, at least until Borland released Turbo Prolog, and then I absolutely had to have a PC.

Agreed. My kids learned MicroWorlds Logo in elementary school from LCSI (Logo Computer Systems Inc). They definitely enjoyed the experience and it served a good preparation for learning other languages as they got older.

I knew this was going to be about Brian Harvey as soon as I saw the title. He was a wonderful presence on comp.lang.logo years ago and would even help struggling noobs with their Scheme questions on occasion. He is a very clear writer and his dedication to teaching is inspiring.

"Many highly selective colleges expect students to take calculus in high school."

Which is exactly why this is not about "gifted" students (whatever that means), but about a lot of students that are interested in math and science and would like to be prepared for first year courses that expect them to at least have exposure to calculus.

To put it in context, California was the state that was looking at stripping the requirement for passing Algebra II as a condition of graduating from community college a few years ago:

https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-intermediate-a...

We had a Pascal class on a VAX in my high school in 1983, and it was fantastic. We used the classic "Oh! Pascal!" text and it was great preparation for college. There was no CS major at the liberal arts school where I ended up, but there were courses with Turbo Pascal taught by the math department before I graduated.