eatmygodetia

that's basically point - you can open an ascii file now because utf-8 is ascii oriented, but a utf-8 first editor will struggle with an old french text file for example. plain text has inbuilt biases which have changed over time, it's not as pure as simple as people say.

I feel like a lot of use plain text proponents forget that outside of ASCII and now UTF-8, lots of alleged plain text documents with diacritics or non-latin characters are at least slightly difficult to open because of their somewhat esoteric encodings. Plain text isn't as universal as it is often claimed, although it is immensely simpler than some other formats.

But maybe we should all use monochrome bitmap files for everything? That would be very simple.

is your wiki still public? the link at the end of the article didn't work for me.

I don't see why you wouldn't consider graphical Emacs to be the canonical implementation. It's part of the primary codebase, several features enabled by default rely on it, and it's what is started when you run emacs with no arguments.

Yes. They removed a lot of the fun definitions in the nineties, but by popular demamd they were brought back!

It smells incredibly clean. The air is very pure, apparently, and it's meant to be good for your healthm I noticed this - my cold cleared up while I was there (and started again soon after). There's a slight cave smell, but not really. I don't know what it's like to smell like being by tue ocean, but I don't remember it smelling much like british beaches.

In Emacs's defence, it didn't reimplement everything so mich as implement it first. When there's very little prior work to go on, often parts of the design won't be great, and then it becomes hard to move away from them.

I'd say that it's just as common to hear "google Our Brand" as "www.brand.com" at the end of television adverts now. That's entirely anecdotal, but Google (or other search engines, but basically Google) has been for a long time the way to access sites.

I see people every day searching for a brand and clicking rather than appending ".com". It's more convenient. If Google can profit off laziness, they will.

I'm suggesting Ada because in my mind it satisfies a similar niche to Rust, but offers a different perspective to Rust. Also I like it more.

Ada is part of the Pascal family, but goes further as it were in all the Pascal aspects, making it essentially the ultimate Pascal. In that regard it's interesting just by being different from C.

It's much more verbose than a lot of languages, which some people like, some people don't, I do. But even if you don't, it's nice to explore some of the design decisions taken in a language designed for use in large-scale systems with long lives.

It was created as /the/ language of the US Department of Defense, which once again may not interest you. I think that in itself makes it exciting, despite having almost no interest in any other aspect of the US.

The compiler has a linter (I guess is the right word) built in, similar to Go or something. It also checks for all sorts of other little errors or potential problems like misspellings, scope, overflows, and off-by-ones. As a language designed to be used in systems controlling space equipment, train networks, and other massive and important things, these features are quite important. I guess more languages have these things now but they were an Ada priority from the beginning.

Useful is definitely relative and for a lot of things Ada won't be the best choice. I've used it for very little, but I think it's a really well done language for the most part that suffers from not being so popular. Now that a lot of other systems languages are getting thrown around - Rust, Go, and things like Nim and Zig - I think Ada should get a share of the light too.

But ultimately I just think that "learn Rust" is said much too often with much too little justification when so many other languages that could be equally as enlightening or fun are around.

Maybe not. As I say, I don't use it, but perhaps I'm not so immune to the hype of it as I thought.

It's a general-purpose programming language, so it can be used for most projects. Most problems can be solved with most languages, sure, but rust is fast and "safe", so people flock to it.

It has some nice features. Personally I never found myself besotted with it, in fact I rather dislike it and suggest ada instead. But rust is much more likely to get you a job.

Emacs.

It's such a mess, but nothing else comes close.

~/tmp - desktop and downloads, mounted as tmpfs.

~/usr/text - pdfs and text files with name format author-title, no hierarchy

~/usr/projects - each project, not sorted by language

~/etc - $XDG_CONFIG_HOME

~/etc/bin - shell scripts

~/bin - programs locally installed

~/src - source code repos, built into ~/bin

~/prog - cache and data

I use CVS to store and version everything, and various environment variable, wrapper script, and alias hacks to move as many dotfiles out the way.

> we can have a "markdown web" with less complex clients

You might want to check out the Gemini protocol[1].

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/