cmacleod4

Here's mine: https://cmacleod.me.uk/ - I'm a retired programmer, my site has links to various projects, mostly in Tcl, some Javascript or C, also old blog, etc.

Note: when posting a link to an article on Newsgrouper it's best to use the "Permalink" at the bottom of the article. People clicking that will get straight to the article without needing to login as a guest. The permalink for this article is: https://newsgrouper.org/%3C10jcmri$l9u0$1@paganini.bofh.team...

As with most Python problems, the solution is to switch to Tcl - https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl9.0/TclCmd/interp.html#M44 :-)

Very interesting!

Note that the name might be confused with an old project: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Feather .

In Tcl you can redefine "if", or even delete it entirely if you're crazy enough :-)

The one thing that really annoys me about HN is that when you return to a discussion that you read the day before, there is no way to easily find the comments which are new since your previous visit. This is basic functionality which Usenet always had (and still does).

What "acquisition"? Nobody owns Usenet, it's a cooperative effort between many different server operators which continues to this day.

"pause the program and run commands in the paused program" - that's often possible in Tcl too. There are various ways to interact with a running program, query or modify variables, run commands, load updated code, etc.

Reader mode in Firefox worked for me :-)

Here's my geoblock message for https://newsgrouper.org -

Blocked due to UK Online Safety Act

You appear to be connecting from an IP address in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately this site is no longer available to UK users. This is due to the requirements of the UK's Online Safety Act, which are not practical for this site to comply with. If you feel this is unjustified, I can only suggest that you write to your Member of Parliament. This site remains in operation for non-UK users, as they are outside the scope of the Act.

For more information see Ofcom's official site, and an unofficial guide.

Other web interfaces to Usenet are available, and may continue to allow UK users, see Wikipedia.

Web UIs exist with a variety of interface styles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... . The now-defunct novaBBS was probably the closest to phpBB in style, but the new go-pugleaf is aiming in a similar direction.

There's a lot less spam since Google Groups disconnected last year. Good text-based providers like https://www.eternal-september.org/ also filter out spam and don't carry the binary groups where porn and piracy is found.

Actually there are a few web interfaces to Usenet that make it easy to jump in, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit...

I operate one of these myself at https://newsgrouper.org .

I'm retired now so I don't care what the market thinks. For applications I expect to be run locally by myself and/or a few other geeks, I use good old Tcl/Tk. For things where I'm aiming for a wider distribution I use plain html & javascript (no frameworks).

This took place on 10-11 July in Bologna, Italy. The schedule page has now been updated with links to the presentation slides and videos.

UK universities should be rolling out the red carpet for all the great students who the USA no longer want. Unfortunately our government seems more interested in pandering to the bigots who think "more foreigners == bad". :-(

Link gives a 404 :-(

Strange, I've been attending the EuroTcl conferences for a few years now, I don't remember any of the presentations I've seen being related to EDA - https://www.eurotcl.eu/pastevents.html :-/

With great power comes great responsibility :-)

The OpenACS and Tcl/Tk Conference 2025 will be held on 10-11 July in Bologna, Italy - https://openacs.km.at/ . For those who appreciate the finer things in programming and web-serving.

Name collision - there is an unrelated "Frink" at https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Programs/Frink/ which is a formatter and checker for the Tcl language.

I'ma big Tcl fan, but Ousterhout has created many other important things - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ousterhout .

Many of the requirements apply to services of any size. This is why I will be blocking UK access to my little service (hosted in my home in the UK) when the act comes into force.

Worth a read!

This is a web gateway to the Usenet discussion groups. I've been working on it for a while and think it's now in a reasonably functional state. It aims to be useable on desktop or mobile devices. Javascript is not required but if it's disabled the keyboard shortcuts will not work.

It may be useful to people who are interested in following or participating in newsgroup discussions but who find it impractical to set up an NNTP client. Anyone can read as a guest but you need to register to be able to post. Only text groups are supported, no binary content.

I'm open to suggestions for things that should be fixed or improved, though I can't guarantee to implement everything. The source code is online at https://chiselapp.com/user/cmacleod/repository/newsgrouper/h... .

Time for a reminder that pretty good ad-blocking can be done with no software at all, just a customised hosts file - https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts :-)

I would argue that Tcl is almost "bicameral" in the OP's sense. The application of the "dodekalogue" rules - https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Dodekalogue - largely corresponds to the "Reader". It goes further in that it also specifies substitution and evaluation rules, but it is similar in that it only applies a few basic structural rules, and knows nothing about the specifics of individual commands.

Tcl's equivalent of the "Parser" is built-in to each command, which decides whether to interpret its arguments as data, code, option flags, etc..

I suspect this division of responsibilities is very helpful for metaprogramming techniques.

The US Tcl conference has not happened for a few years now, but EuroTcl continues, I gave a talk there myself this year - https://openacs.org/conf2024/info/ .

I'm not sure it's just due to cost-cutting. Certainly here in the UK there has been a very noticeable shift from bright colours of cars to multiple shades of grey and other colours which to my old eyes look drab and sludgy. My impression is that this is the current fashion.

You could run hundreds of nodes for the Autonomi peer-to-peer distributed storage network, see https://autonomi.com/ .