russellallen

No, I'm not making that distinction. I'm just saying that text editors and word processors have historically and up to this day been somewhat different beasts written for different audiences with different focuses on their features.

Sure, I can do emacs with softwrapping to write my next legal contract. I can also do text editing in Word for my next LaTex document. But I wouldn't want to.

This is not an obscure distinction to make.

Sidebar: Actually I much prefer a recent Word to WordPerfect 5.1. But the question was command line tools, and WordPerfect 5.1 is a good example of a terminal based document creation tool focused on creating, well, documents. It should be easily possible to make a modern equivalent - a terminal based editor focused narrowly on the creation of the same sorts of documents Word is good at. But I don't know of one, and a tricked out emacs doesn't really get there.

Well Emacs can almost but not quite be everything of course.

But this is a pretty common distinction, surely?

Words are text, but word processors have historically been focused on preparing documents for printing (or nowdays viewing a visual representation of a printed document onscreen, eg PDF).

They handle differing visual layout (fonts, page breaks, margins, indenting). They are softwrapped and paragraph based not line based. Often they deal with formatting through styles - headers, bullet points, numbering. They usually handle inclusion of tables, images and other non-text elements.

The most common example of a word processor, Word, also handles collaborative writing with tracked changes and notes, and has inbuilt features such as on the fly word count, spelling and grammar checks.

As I said, for a command line word processor look at WordPerfect for DOS or equivalent.

What you are saying (and it is not entirely wrong) is that you can approximate a word processor by matching a text editor with a bunch of other programs (TeX, Pandoc, aspell etc). But that doesn't make the text editor a word processor.

I'm a big command line fan, but vi/emac/nano are not word processors. They're text editors.

You might be able to get close if you are using them to edit Markdown and running it through Pandoc (especially if you add in a non-commandline PDF viewer). But still.

WordPerfect 5.1 - now that was a curses/command line word processor :) I don't know of a modern equivalent though.

I'll see if I can do one and send it to you.

Cool!

It has Morphic with a snapshot of Squeak which is fair enough but it'd be nice to also include Self[1] which is where Morphic came from and which has I think a nicer implementation[2] of visual programming.

[1]: http://selflanguage.org/ [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYEKO7JcmLE

Much of the syntax is similar too:

  (2 + 4) == 5 ifTrue: [ Transcript show: 'Yay!' ] "Squeak"
  (2 + 4) == 5 ifTrue: [ 'Yay!' printLine ] "Self"

Yeah, its a fair cop. The website is old and more about people who already know about Self than people who don't. I'll put fixing it on my todo list.

Self the system still exists - this isn't just archeology. The website is at http://selflanguage.org and the Git sources at http://github.com/russellallen/self

The VM compiles on recent OS X and x86 Linux and it's pretty fun to play with. There is something about the underlying simplicity of the object model and the immediacy and concreteness of the system which makes programming in it for me unlike other programming languages, even after all this time.

I should do up a new release though - the downloadable binaries are a few years old now.

Sometimes I think people could better spend their time on something more useful. Then I realise I'm sitting in front of a web browser browsing Hacker News. :)

I enjoy eating more than I enjoy most other things I do, so saving time by not eating in order to spend more time doing other stuff doesn't really appeal...

Oh well. I guess there must be people out there who spend all their time doing things more fascinating and enjoyable than eating a tasty meal.

This is an interesting article on this "rule":

http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324

What does "one space" even mean? Does it mean only one character's width? No, because that varies. Does it mean the same width as all other spaces? No, because as explained above typesetting systems often make the space longer, and many traditional typographers did likewise. Does it mean only pressing the spacebar once? No, because that won't make a difference in many systems like TeX, HTML.

It's just a typographical shibboleth, nothing more.

Many of the early Smalltalk books, including the Blue Book which includes a description of Smalltalk written in Smalltalk, and the Green Book with essays on very early Smalltalk history, can be already downloaded from http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html

A currency which changes in value by around 40% in a 24 hour period is completely useless for the transactions I mostly deal with. We worry about a few percent change over weeks and insist on hedges.

Imagine saying to someone - I'll put 1000 BTC into your venture when you reach the next milestone in two months. What's that going to be? USD 100,000? USD 50,000? USD 1.50?

I think I can blame TED for lending its name and reputation to a process which would inevitably turn up talks like this...

Sure, the film industry is tough to break into. But making a good indie film to get a crack at a studio production (or a crack at a higher budget independent) is very similar to making a startup to become a talent acquisition for example.

If you don't like the analogy, pick another one. But more broadly, there is a lot of similarities between the types of people involved. I've advised creative, driven indie filmmakers who fit right into the creative, driven mould of startup entrepreneurs.

There is lot of overlap in how the film industry and the tech industries work - and startups and indie films are a great analogy!

If I want it to be a useful currency, I want it stable and predictable. Otherwise I have to mitigate my currency risk by hedging or taking out forward exchange contracts (assuming that I can find someone prepared to offer that service for bitcoins)

Large value movements, up or down, are not a good thing.

Dunno what 'dead' means. There are several commercial vendors and several open source versions. The ecosystem is at least stable and probably growing.

We used to see these articles for object orientation. Now we see them for functional. I look forward with bated breath for the next paradigm!

It doesn't matter if bitcoin is high or low against USD. All that matters is stability. It's supposed to be a currency not an investment.

Trained animals is a good metaphor. Not passive objects acted upon but actors. Your example is even cleaner in Self which allows implicit 'self':

  emptyInto: vessel = (| here |
    here: place.
    go: vessel place.
    vessel add: spill.
    go: here
  )

Australia and the US already have a free trade agreement: http://www.austrade.gov.au/AUSFTA/default.aspx

Write no classes: http://selflanguage.org :)

Another approach to this type of thing worth checking out is Dan Ingall's Lively Kernel http://lively-kernel.org/

Not knowing who Kayak are makes this headline especially interesting. What does it mean to be a kayak of online insurance? Are CoverHound able to right themselves if they capsize? Are they slow and hard to paddle?

It is a collection of writings containing some of the oldest recorded human stories, poetry and philosophy, law, history, and myth. Reading it is no more a waste of time than reading the Iliad or Plato.

You too should read $classic-tome to learn $trite-lesson.

Oh agreed, there was a sense in Victorian men's fashion of prudence, restraint etc (while showing your status by quality of fabrics and cut etc). There were similar fashions in Dutch Golden Age and the Puritans. But that's not the same as the Enlightenment...