daly

I can highly recommend "Beyond Product" by Jill Soley

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Product-Jill-Soley/dp/16427912...

Congrats. You are the 10,000 person to try to rewrite Lisp syntax. Like all of those who failed before you, you've missed the point.

I looked at using hydrogen at home. It's a bad idea.

Hydrogen can leak thru the tightest seals.

Hydrogen makes steel brittle.

Hydrogen fires are invisible and do not generate heat "out the sides" so you can walk into a hydrogen fire without knowing until you're in it.

Hydrogen self-ignites on contact with platinum, something often found in jewelry.

Hydrogen is violently explosive in proper concentration.

etc.

I've been a lisper since 1971 and did reviews of the X3J13 Common Lisp Standard. I've been using Common Lisp on almost every project I do.

Contrary to popular belief, and apparently your own belief, Common Lisp is doing fine.

Language rankings are meaningless.

Does this also apply to software?

Coffee.

When I wake up and until I've had a cup of coffee I have trouble reading small fonts. By the second cup I can read prescription-sized fonts.

A few cups later, though, my ears close up and things sound like I'm under water.

So there is a happy medium.

My printer.

In 50 years of programming I've worked with a few. One characteristic is a deep understanding and command of all that they touch.

For example, I worked with Bill Schelter (GNU Common Lisp). In 1980, prior to the Internet, we were working on a problem (tail recursion). He was using the emacs editor and he found a bug.

Bill stopped what he was doing, fetched the sources for emacs (using ftp), found the source of the bug, fixed it, and sent off a patch. After that he restarted emacs and continued right where he left off. It was a virtuoso performance. It was like watching Victor Borga (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKeqaDSjy98).

I know a guy who plays guitar. He can listen to a performance and repeat it as easily as I can type what I read. He can transpose keys, add riffs, change tuning "on the fly", and even play thru with a broken string, adjusting chords to the new "5 string" form. He also knows guitar characteristics, pedal effects, etc., basically "all things guitar".

Great software engineers I've known seem to have complete command of all of the ideas, tools, and techniques. They understand their tools "all the way down to the metal" and all the way "up to the esthetics". You can see great people in all crafts (like woodworking).

They also write beautiful "crafted" code. I'm keyboarding a FORTRAN punched card deck (for an historical museum). You can see from the code that the author wrote clean, careful, and clear code. You can almost feel how good he was.

Greatness isn't about "team player", "hard working", "good at time estimation", or anything "social". Greatness is a property of the person, a deep love of the craft, and a focus on "doing it right".

I tripped across the paper while researching another topic.

It is still important today. I spent time as a visiting scholar at CMU. Lenore Blum resigned over this issue in 2018.

She cited “professional harassment” and “sexist management” on the school’s Oakland campus over the past three years as reasons for their departure.

https://www.post-gazette.com/business/tech-news/2018/08/22/C...

Anyone interviewer who asks this question should be fired.

This shows a lack of respect for the person being interviews. It shows a waste of company time and effort. It shows a lack of critical thinking by the interviewer.

Planes are infinite. Assuming the simplifying assumption that tennis balls are 2D, there are an infinite number of them.

Taxes pay for roads... which are not used when working from home. So they should get a tax break.

Taxes pay for schools... which are not used when learning from home. So they should get a tax break.

I've used make for all my projects. Highly recommended.

Companies die on average after about 15 years. IBM had a set of core principles that helped it survive, even through tough times like the depression. IBM was known for its excellent management training (ask about the Monkey lecture) and promoting from within.

In 1995, they hired Lou Gerstner (aka the cookie monster) from Nabisco as CEO. He did not share the core principles. My whole department was laid off. It was amusing to have an exit interview (aka getting fired) sitting across from a manager with a sign that said, in essence, IBM doesn't fire. They used to try to contact other managers to find a "better fit" for your skills. Gerstner basically felt that unemployment was a better fit.

After that the company was lost. It has never recovered from Gerstner. It never will.

I can't bring myself to leave a bug alone. So my "debugging saga" continues. I've noticed 3 things.

First, if you use the arrow keys to move around, the cursor lags and even disappears. This is really not useful when trying to reach a position in an editor.

Second, emacs split buffers (C-X 3 splits the buffer into 2 side-by-side windows) has a problem. The screen refresh sometimes trashes the display. It can be recovered with C-L, of course, so the data isn't damaged but it is annoying. The cursor control is even worse in this configuration. Sometimes the cursor leaves the current buffer and ends up somewhere else on the screen so it appears you are typing in a random screen location. C-L recovers this and you see the data in the correct place.

Third, rather than using a keyboard macro I used "galloping fingers". That is I repeatedly hit

1 down left... 2 down left... 3 down left, in overwrite mode to create columns of numbers.

I've been doing this for years (I've been programming for 50 years). At this point my fingers are, like a drummer, highly reliable. I get a rhythm going and rarely fail... except that on WSL some of the keystrokes get lost so I end up with missing numbers or in the wrong column. It happens about every 50 or so numbers. I notice that it seems to happen when emacs autosaves. So somehow the autosave interruption is losing keystrokes.

I find it hard to believe that keystrokes get lost but that appears to be at least one of the problems. It seems also to be related to "injected keystrokes" in a keyboard macro. Cursor control is also badly broken. This might be related since cursor movement is keyboard driven.

I don't have Windows source code so I'm only guessing.

It is nice and useful if you just want to do a "hit and run", like grep a file.

I'm just suggesting that it is not a tool for larger tasks. Install VirtualBox, which works well.

I hardly consider typing text as "a heavy IO task". I max out at 40 WPM

I'm not running a production server (or anything else compute-intensive). I agree that Windows does the "toy" things better than Linux, such as web browsing, sleep handling, sound management, etc. These are "appliance" level tasks where Windows is definitely better.

That said, I wouldn't even consider doing a full system build (takes about 3 hours on my fastest machine) on WSL. All I'm trying to do is enter 2800 numbered lines of text. The Windows machine was more portable so I chose to move it to the problem rather than move the problem to my office.

Now I'm continuing on WSL and trying to understand the faulting behavior.

Relax.

I limit myself to 1 visit per website per day because I have to get things done. On HN I limit myself to the first 1000 posts so I have a breakpoint.

Clearly I've returned within 8 hours, violating my own rules (but it IS sunday :-) )

That said, I've been trying to understand the nature of the problem by continuing to use WSL (against my better judgement). I have more to complain about.

I normally install VirtualBox. It runs just fine and has not ever had a lag problem. I didn't install VirtualBox, opting to use WSL instead (Ubuntu).

Normally such a lag is due to paging. But paging lag has a "blocky" kind of update, long lag then fast update. This problem seems to be more about event handling (more about that in another reply) as it occurs on every character.

WSL1 editing a local file. Start WSL, type 'emacs -nw file'

I have no idea what 'conhost' is so I can't comment.

I was involved with 2 startups where I was the technical co-founder. Within a month my shares were reduced to 10% in one and 7% in the other. But I was doing all the actual work.

Don't be "that guy".

The computer systems running this LISP code had 4k of memory. There are a few subroutines (e.g. APUSH, FPUSH, CAR, CDR, etc.) but the inner loop looks pretty much like a tightly coded state machine. I suspect most of the FORTRAN statements will compile to single instructions (on some architectures). FORTRAN level subroutine/function calls would use a stack and chew up memory.

My PDP-8/f System was a small machine with a paper tape reader/punch on the teletype. Running the multi-pass FORTRAN compiler, linker, and library code paper tapes (including intermediate tapes) could take all day. I usually just hand-patched the final binary paper tape (using a small plastic holder and a 1-hole punch). The fact that I could run LISP and interact "on the fly" was an amazing advance.

Later, when I worked for Unimation trying to computer-control industrial robots I got a Data General NOVA. Unfortunately I didn't have a FORTRAN compiler. All the robot work was done in hex machine code. Oh, if I only had a LISP!

PlusAI drove across the country in a self-driving truck nearly a year ago.

https://plus.ai/Plus-ai-Completes-First-Cross-Country-Commer...

FOSS projects with a very few, part time, developers (usually only 1), have very limited time to handle bug/feature requests. Half the time I'm spending on my projects involves fixing bugs introduced by changing tools (e.g. the project no longer compiles because somebody changed the C compiler, or the Ubuntu linux libraries no longer match the RedHat ones).

Imagine how much grief was caused by the requirement to ASK people about cookies, which we see everywhere. Or the grief about http vs https, encryption, IP4 vs IP6, accessibility, host vs mobile page sizes, Apple developer fees, copyright and trademark issues, bandwidth requirements, timezone and country-specific issues, font issues (e.g. cyrillic), social grief (master vs main), etc. Note that almost none of these have anything to do with the application but require developer time and attention.

Oh, and don't forget, if your project is used everywhere then people will develop attacks against it. If there is a security issue with your application you might get sued and lose everything. Legal issues alone are a nightmare. Do you know the copyright law differences between EU and US law? Even large companies like Facebook seem to be struggling:

Facebook said it might stop operating in Europe if the EU suspends all data transfers to the US.

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-eu-us-data-transfer...

Because business people are not engineers.

Telling a business person they have a software problem is meaningless. Showing them losing a LOT of money because they ignored it gets attention. Ask any hospital about ransomware. Our local hospital is still running Windows 7 and older versions.

Everybody loves network connected new cars. Nobody thinks about the fact that they are "fly by wire", using software to control everything. Who thinks about changing the battery controller to cause a battery fire? Or controlling the acceleration to maximum? Or setting off the airbags? Or...

Use your imagination. What could go wrong in a 2 ton computer on wheels? Especially one that has a camera and software that can recognize "soft targets" (i.e. people).

It really should be illegal to have network connected cars. Any software security engineer knows that. But you can't convince a business person.

I have run an open source project for nearly 20 years. The mailing list has over 14,000 entries by 380 people. Anyone can post. Anyone can contribute. There are no women postings. This puzzles me.

Yet MIT and CMU seems to have CS classes that have a large number of women.

I have no insight on this subject. But Caitlin's book seems to speak to one of the potential issues. On the other hand, my high school peer group studied physics, chemistry, and chess. Things anyone can do. But no women joined. I had mostly female friends in high school but we never "talked tech". We did have a year long discussion of what "friendship" means, a topic never mentioned with my male friends.

Anyway, I continue to try to understand.

I have my photocopied version... but I also bought the book.

Pardon implies 2 things: (1) you are now guilty and (2) you can't invoke the 5th when testifying.

The inability to invoke the 5th means that every question has to be answered (truthfully or you end up with a new charge). A pardon means that some secrets can be revealed.

If Trump pardons himself he loses all 5th amendment protection.

Depends. How can you get your boss off your back? :-)