jcw

Also see his mandelbrot set/towers of hanoi using vim macros (not vim scripts, but macros): http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/vim/index.php

I'm trying to do this myself--I taught myself C, but still can't write any non-trivial programs. Some people find C easy to comprehend, and think naturally in terms of pointers. Not me.

Gnu Ed's source code is quite easy to read. Plan 9's utilities also have very clear, concise source code.

From the site, it looks like it has regex search/replace and multiple/vertical selection. It also looks like it can automate tasks (with macros, perhaps?).

I use vim, but I've been thinking lately that all you really need to efficiently edit text are the above things listed. Vim and Emacs are extremely powerful, but your first experience with them was probably awful, and the learning curves are steep. Is a powerful AND intuitive text editor possible?

Because we are trying to build a tower from the machine to the abstract?

Geez. All this Be nostalgia lately has had _me_ pining for it, and I've never used it. Gonna try out R5 on my old pentium II. Hopefully it'll replace XP. It seems fitting, as that computer is nothing more than a toy for making art.

In that regard, is it art?

I've read this and various other scheme macro tutorials and still can't make sense of them. There's still a lot going on in the background with hygenic macros, basic tutorials won't teach you how to write even simple ones on your own.

PLT seems to document them well from the ground up: http://download.plt-scheme.org/doc/html/guide/macros.html

Steven Pressfield (author of Gates of Fire and Legend of Bagger Vance) would disagree: http://home.stevenpressfield.com/books/war_art.asp#excerpt

I highly recommend The War of Art, his book on overcoming procrastination for artists. Sit down every day and work.

Stuff like this makes me want to make the jump (from vim). There are _cats_ on the front page.

It's nice to see people still remember BeOS.

I never had a chance to use it, but it looked like there was something special about it. Did anyone here own a BeOS system?

Are you just burnt out? When you're low on inspiration, taking a day to do everything but work can do wonders. Get out the house, see some friends.

Just today I was tinkering with dreamscheme and its SDL hooks, thinking about writing a pong clone, wondering if it would gain any attention after Haskell pong has.

I'm installing it right now.

I kept hitting ⌘0, wondering why nothing was happening.

It starts up about as fast as IE6 does. I'm guessing two or three seconds.

Because of Arora, that computer is actually usable now. Thanks for the great browser!

Here I am thinking that it's a required nowadays that browsers are huge, hulking monsters because of the multitude of things that need to be parsed and rendered on a web page. A minimal and unix-y browser sounds wonderful.

I've been enjoying Arora lately because of how small and lightweight it is, it runs blazingly fast on my old 64mb/333mhz: http://code.google.com/p/arora/

How does Uzbl match up to it in terms of memory usage? I'm (probably wrongfully) assuming it runs slowly because it's written in python.

How would one go about learning machine language for, say, x86? I already know a fair bit of assembly.

I'm 20 and I drink totally way too much coffee.

See, the "...Or Does It" clause refers to the theory that the internet is actually the collective subconscious (certain fringe weirdos propose it is in fact the entire abstract), and we just now have found a (somewhat) tangible way to access it, however primitive and incomplete.

Awesome. This is a great addition to the plaintext arsenal (which includes Markdown and Textile).

I'd like to see a superfluous extension/hack of this to be able to produce art and cool-looking things in general, a la pixmaps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap

This is really cool.

I thought one of the design decisions of SQL was that it would NOT be Turing complete, so hacks like this could not exist. It's funny that the nature of a database makes things like this possible. Can a turing machine be made only using SQL queries? Could a higher-level language compile to it?

I wish I could upvote this twice. I love minimal/tiny languages.

Wait, what happened with them all "getting arrested" and everything?

Why are we having Erlang day instead of _why day?

Why do we have to have Erlang day while I am knee deep in messy PHP work?

I love Panic so much.

I was about to post the same link. I would rather read that guy's excellent and concise article than buy this couple's book or sift through their entire blog for details.

Because we're all afflicted with terrible ADD after years of internet usage. We need short paragraphs with key sentences bolded and big colorful images in-between to keep our attention.

The GT library gets pretty stuffy during the summer.

A lot of times, micro-optimizations are more fun.

In a hobbyist culture, we tend to do what is most fun.

Bing and Yahoo's pages are either bloated with images and effects or overwhelmingly busy. I search with Google because of its fast and minimal interface. I'm not distracted by eye-catching advertisements or anything, and I get my results immediately. I could care less about slightly more accurate results.