chris_j

Overtone [0] is a precursor to Sonic Pi that uses Clojure. Sam used to work on it before he created Sonic Pi. I remember having great fun playing with it at a Clojure meetup in about 2011. Overtone appears to still be going if you want to check it out.

[0] https://github.com/overtone/overtone

Sam previously worked on Overtone, which is a Clojure library for driving the Supercollider synthesiser. I understand that he decided to create Sonic Pi in Ruby in order to make it more accessible to beginners. (And Ruby was all the rage back then.)

I haven't used Overtone in many years but it looks like it's still going: https://github.com/overtone/overtone

I take a different view. For a lot of candidates that I've interviewed in recent years, they made the decision to move to London, and _then_ decided to apply to us. Some of the best engineers that I've worked with have joined that way, and many of them stuck around for a long time. Of course the candidate should show an interest in the company. But frankly, if you're an employer in a place that people want to move to, that's something that you should be taking advantage of, not complaining when the candidate is honest about it.

Indeed. I've lived in the UK my entire life, and I've only ever heard "sorry" used to mean "excuse me, can I get past please?" in and around London. It still sounds weird to me. Where I come from (further from London), you'd just say "excuse me".

In my father's accent/dialect (South Wales), the number seven is monosyllabic: it sounds more like "sevn" (with the v pronounced quite softly). The number "eleven" is similarly monosyllabic, and sounds more like "levn". I often use this when counting to a rhythm. Shame the numbers from thirteen onwards do have more than one syllable.

One thing that I heard from folks who do development for retro Atari platforms is that the 68k support in GCC has been getting worse as time has gone on, and it's very difficult to get the maintainers to accept patches to improve it, since 68k is not exactly widely used at this point.

Specifically, I heard that the 68k backend keeps getting worse, whilst the front-end keeps getting better. So choosing a GCC version is a case of examining the tradeoffs between getting better AST-level optimisations from a newer version, or more optimised assembly language output from an earlier version.

I imagine GCC 6.5 probably has a backend that makes better use of the 68k chip than the GCC 11.4 that ngdevkit uses (such as knowing when to use dbra) but is probably worse in other ways due to an older and less capable frontend.

What happened? Did they stop using FreeBSD? Did they continue to use it but jsut stop contributing?

I'm not familiar with the iOS 20. What is meant by "non-notarized websites" and what did Apple do?

My favourite example of this sort of redundancy is the fact that there are numerous rivers in England called the River Avon. Avon is believed to come from the Proto-Brythonic word "aβon" [0], meaning "river".

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Brythoni...

What differences do you think you'd see if ARM directly sold a silicon product?

What does "AEism" mean in this context?

I played Ur-Quan Masters for the first time earlier this year. Despite its age, I found it to be one of the finest games that I'd ever played. The story, in particular, is just perfect, and has just the right mixture of seriousness and comedy, very much in the same style as another (even older) classic, Starflight. Being able to build the game from source and read through the code was a nice bonus.

I highly recommend checking it out; if you can get over the rather dated graphics and gameplay mechanics then you'll find this to be a real gem.

> I look at welsh and still go wtf lol

Ironically, Welsh is a much simpler language than Irish, and easier to learn for an English speaker. Almost completely regular orthography, much simpler grammar (with no grammatical cases). But, simple or not, the grammar and orthography are very different to English.

Do you mind if I ask how you learned Irish? It's a language that I would like to learn a little of at some point, but so far I've been too daunted to attempt it.

What is it that makes USB perfectly fine for spinning rust but not quite ideal for SSDs?

I've been booting a couple of Pi 4s from USB SSDs for a while, in order to avoid relying on SD cards, but I'm not really familiar with what all of the implications of this are.

What is it that would make big moons of terrestrial inner planets vanishingly rare?

And how likely is it that a planet without a large moon would fail to retain a short day? Mars has a day of similar length to that of Earth (though no magnetic field worth speaking of...).

What is meant by 'a bit "FC"' in this context?

Many thanks. I did use gedit for a while, though I confess I never became as fond of it as I had been of NEdit. It does tick the "uncomplicated text editor" box though.

NEdit was my main editor for a few years after I started using UNIX in the late 90s but couldn't get the hang of vi and emacs. I have fond memories of using it and I'm pretty sad that it was so tied to Motif that it never developed further. I used it on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and even Windows (via Cygwin). I kind of miss using an editor so uncomplicated.

Many thanks, makes sense now.

What does SSBC mean in this context?

What does "T levels" mean in this context?

Why was a 68030 a curious choice for a machine launched in 1988?

You can write apps for an Android phone without jailbreaking/rooting it. And you don't need an expensive license to use Android Studio. Point taken that the barrier to entry is higher though.

Why wrongfully? Is there something wrong with the term "micro-computer" that I'm not aware of?

On the subject of TDD, the way I've done TDD has been very similar to the technique described in the article. Work in very small increments, try to get a very thin vertical slice of functionality working through the system as soon as possible and, whatever you build, try to get it working end-to-end as soon as you can. Of course, I use tests to drive the work but I find it very helpful to use tests to drive those thin vertical slices of functionality.

The book that really helped me to start working in this way is Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce [0]. The book has been around for a few years at this point and tech has moved on since then, as have some of the techniques, but it's still a very interesting read. (Disclosure: I was lucky enough to briefly work with one of the authors a few years ago but I was a fan of the book long before then.)

[0] http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/

Did I hear that you're looking for an emulator? I recommend Hatari [0] if you want to run games and demos. You'll likely need a TOS ROM image [1]; Hatari comes with EmuTOS, which doesn't work with a lot of games that make assumptions about the memory layout of internal OS structures and the like.

If you want to run well written GEM applications then I recommend ARAnyM [2], which is a lot faster, due to not attempting to do a cycle-accurate emulation of all the original hardware.

And if you have any issues with the above, there are still lots of people hanging out in Atari-Forum that might be able to help [3].

[0] https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/

[1] http://www.avtandil.narod.ru/tose.html

[2] https://aranym.github.io/

[3] https://www.atari-forum.com/

What was it about the war that prevented finance moving out to the continent?

The ST in mono was alas only around 71hz. Still very nice. Sadly my family could not afford a mono monitor and and I used my ST through the family TV but I used a friend's mono monitor a few times and it was very nice.

I bought Amiga Forever a few years ago in order to get the Kickstart ROMs that I needed to play some games in FS-UAE on my Mac. Trying to actually get the content onto my Mac was more painful than I'd anticipated. "To install the stuff you've just bought, just double click this .msi installer". Heh, thanks.

(I can't remember what I did in the end but I did manage to get the Kickstart ROMs into my Mac.)

EDIT: typo.

Around ten years ago, I worked for IBM as a software engineer. The dress code at work was pretty casual, so I tended to wear jeans and a t-shirt in the office. One day, I was asked to speak at an event that would be attended by a lot of our customers. I asked my mentor, "Should I dress up? Should I wear my suit for the first time in years?" His response surprised me. He said, "These customers have come here to talk to engineers. Do you want them to think we've sent a salesman to talk to them." He made it perfectly clear that I should dress like an engineer. I confess I did get rid of the t-shirt; I wore a casual shirt with my jeans that day, and the folks that I talked to went away satisfied that they had indeed spoken with an engineer.