yannis

It is an entertaining article, but I am not too sure if I agree that Knuth was yak shaving. However by luck, inspiration, conviction or observation he understood what makes a program last. You focus on one thing and you do it well. On the way you resolve all the problems. He famously said that at first he had one user: himself but then things were different when he had 1000 users. At that stage you need to remove bugs and hence his famous checks rewarding people that reported bugs. When your user base grows allow them to extend the program through their own code. I also think that the program adapted well, throughout the four decades of its usage due to the well thought level of abstraction. Nearing my three score and ten years, and using TeX/LaTeX for all these decades, I can with confidence state, that the only people yak shaving was us all the early adopters, learning typography rather than focusing on our studies. The same can of course be said for current users.

TeX doesn't do this automatically, but is rare to see "rivers" in TeX produced publications due to the superiority of its paragraph building algorithm.

It is Pascal, which is then used to compile the original TeX code. See example of running TeX/LaTeX at [1].

PGF/TikZ is a very well written program. What impresses me is that it does have the right amount of abstraction. It comes in different layers, starting from the Front End (TikZ), Basic Layer (which TikZ) uses This layer is built on top of the system layer. Whereas the system layer just provides the absolute minimum for drawing graphics, the basic layer provides numerous commands that make it possible to create sophisticated graphics easily and also quickly.

The basic layer does not provide a convenient syntax for describing graphics, which is left to frontends like TikZ. For this reason, the basic layer is typically used only by “other programs”. For example, the beamer package (can be used for presentations) uses the basic layer extensively, but does not need a convenient input syntax. Rather,speed and flexibility are needed when beamer creates graphics

The system layer, and drivers then create the the graphics in various formats, such as postscript, pdf etc.

[1] https://tex.rossprogram.org/

PARI/GP for number theory calculations, is now in the browser thanks to WebAssemly.

https://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/gp.html

I wonder how this is related also to meetings. From my own experience, any meeting with more than 3 persons can never yield results effectively.

See the "the earliest Englishman" aka "Pildown man" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

Stereotypical comments, lower the standards of this site and are intellectually tiresome.

Thanks for posting it. Very interesting to read.

I was born omnivorous. However, I accept the premise to minimize suffering of animals, including humans in all respects.

I have collected stamps as a kid and I have been collecting Postal History for decades on and off, focusing mainly on research and writing up the covers that I have managed to collect. Kept me sane during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Philately is not about 'chasing madly a missing stamp', but a journey for those interested in history, especially local history. It is still a great hobby and to anyone interested to start, start from buying a small collection. Most collectors will either buy from a dealer, but most often from an auction. See https://stampauctionnetwork.com/ as an example. You can build a collection with very little money or spent hundreds of thousands.

It inspires me to hold an old letter (cover or wrapper in philatelic jargon), that has travelled through a ship across continents and has survived for 200 years and now is in my collection. Pre-stamp letters go for very little, especially North American, British and really for a song for most European countries.

The bitcoin of the early eighties was 'getting into hard assets'. Lots of funds invested into stamps and drove prices to levels that collectors couldn't buy. They burnt their fingers, while collectors waited. It is still a huge market possibly 3-5 billion USD a year. As an investment I would not recommend them, but as a nice indoor hobby and to socialize outside your own circle is worth it.

Most amazing he also came to Cyprus and I was a kid at the time. We all went to see him in his car parade. Posters with his picture were left pasted on walls for many years. Video here https://www.britishpathe.com/video/gagarin-in-cyprus

Thanks for posting. This can be very useful, especially for personal local use. The "README" needs a bit more polish.

Best at the source, with great photos, https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/a-well-preserved...

Besides this, the world not just the US need standby health personnel in a similar fashion to armies. Soldiers do nothing unless needed, a "health workers" army can do the same.

Has the US gone nuts? I know this might not go well in some circles, but is there another way to put it?

Monadology (French: La Monadologie, 1714) which is one of Gottfried Leibniz's best known works representing his later philosophy has pretty much the same arguments.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology

Agreed, however the murders were real.

I was in RSA in the early 80s. There were a lot of RSA ships doing research in the area at the time. As was the custom the issued commemorating envelopes with special postmarks at the time https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/323741168155_/Antarc... they were all postmarked "Neutron Research". At the time the rumour was that they were developing "a neutron bomb". This and the red mercury incidentshttps://mg.co.za/article/1995-01-20-sadf-linked-to-red-mercu... left no doubt in my mind that the tests took place.

Lua's Lpeg module (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/) is probably what you are after:

     lower = lpeg.R("az")
     upper = lpeg.R("AZ")
     letter = lower + upper

Personally I prefer though the terseness of regular expressions.

It is safe to use using the rpc package. See Rob Pike's https://blog.golang.org/gobs-of-data for motivation.

It is a pity though, that the source code is not publicly available, even if the license is not GPL'd it could still be made available to non-members.

Nice example of using "gob" to create RPC services. But why call it a "framework"?

They did not use ink. It is actually a stylus used to write on wax tablets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet). Later in the article it says ... Other finds included more than 400 waxed writing tablets, which offer insights into the first decades of Roman rule in Britain.

Thanks for the article. I know you mentioned at the end of the article that there will be a future article with more details about your recommendation to use Rust. Can you expand on your reasons for this a bit?

A small tangential comment: In the README you mention octopi. Although not wrong as per the Oxford English Dictionary which lists octopuses, octopi and octopodes (in that order), normally it is better to use octopuses.

There is a beautifully illustrated arxiv paper Ballooning Spiders: The Case for Electrostatic Flight by Peter W. Gorham at https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4731, which is a good read, if you want to get a bit more into the subject.

It is always interesting to see Gates reading list. Most books on the current list is about upheavals and issues in society.

Paul Collier's Book, The Future of Capitalism is on the list.

This is an excellent book, but perhaps a bit dated despite the fact that Mathematical Books have a long shelf-life. Factoid: The book is noteworthy because it was a major source of information for the legendary and self-taught mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan who managed to obtain a library loaned copy from a friend in 1903...

It is gaining a bit of traction with LuaLaTeX and the luamplib library, but unfortunately PGF/tikZ seems to be the preferred library for many projects.

Notable is Alan Edelman's tip using Julia at the 36th lecture.

Jacaranda trees are possibly the most beautiful trees for residential areas. I used to leave in South Africa in a street lined with jacarandas. Only disadvantage streets need to be cleaned often and if the flowers drop on a parked car they can stain the paint.