mdhughes

5 ms·

1.
by mdhughes 7y ago
Which eggs? I'm on Mac, and in Chicken 5 currently, everything has "just worked". SDL required me to hit the SDL site for the frameworks, the rest I've used have had no external requirements.
2.
by mdhughes 7y ago
I've never had a Windows, I'm a Mac nerd, but I'm looking into it for cross-platform binaries. Option 1: MS has a Linux subsystem now. Problem solved, but maybe not customer-friendly. Option 2: Cygwin probably works, I'v
3.
by mdhughes 7y ago
[Chicken Scheme]( https://call-cc.org ) is fast, makes native binaries, and has a giant library of "eggs" covering most of the SRFIs. It's R5RS working its way towards R7RS. I've been using it for my "Pyth
4.
by mdhughes 7y ago
I spend most of my time now in Chicken Scheme http://call-cc.org/ and it's very productive, has a ton of libraries ("eggs"), and makes nice, fast native binaries. Scheme's right on the edge of ascetic di
5.
by mdhughes 7y ago
Go ahead and invent some totally unique tool nobody's ever seen before. I'll wait. You, uh, you got one yet? No? The point is to make your own version of a thing; it doesn't have to be one of those few I listed. To see that
6.
by mdhughes 7y ago
Without the experience of making and supporting such tools, you'll never acquire wisdom, or many useful skills. Thought.py is maybe my 4th note-taking system, simpler and more precisely what I needed than any previous. Practice makes p
7.
by mdhughes 7y ago
Why, so have I, and so has every other programmer on Earth. https://mdhughes.tech/thoughtpy/ This has been mostly used as my engineering notebook, in lieu of stacks of Moleskines. Simple command-line tool for editing a
8.
by mdhughes 7y ago
I'm one of the people who kicked in for the Megatokyo visual novel kickstarter. Years later, no visible progress; I'm not even mad, I knew exactly what I was signing up for, which was supporting a comic that had slowed to almost n
9.
by mdhughes 7y ago
Strongly disagree. VS Code is a corporate tool IDE, which is dull and awkward to use as just an editor, and binary spyware in it "phones home" to its users' masters in Redmond. It's exactly what an MSDN subscriber would
10.
by mdhughes 8y ago
Very simplistic and shallow list, but it's by Charles Petzold, noted Microsoft shill and bad tech book writer. In '96, LISP (tail end of the AI winter regardless), Perl (half the WWW was Perl), Tcl (maybe a quarter of the WWW and
11.
by mdhughes 8y ago
Slack is a poorly-written Electron app, and unfortunately it's the poster child for it. Discord does more with a fraction of the resources, and is also Electron. Atom is a giant editor framework, and is still less heavy than Slack in n
12.
by mdhughes 8y ago
Cross-platform is the key problem. If I want to write a Mac-only app, I can do that in Objective-C/Cocoa, and be quite happy. For Linux, native means fighting with primitive C and X11 or Gtk, etc., which I can do but I loathe it. For W
13.
by mdhughes 8y ago
This is using Python 2, which is end-of-lifed. Those bare print statements are gauche. Python does have a variable keyword, `global`. While JavaScript can omit semicolons, it's an incredibly bad idea outside of console/Node REPL
14.
by mdhughes 8y ago
You can actually run LUA scripts from chat, exactly the same way: ``` /script d("Hello") ``` But the PC/Mac ESO community tends to be older (rated M) and less gullible in chat. Gold-sellers got a cold reception and rapid
15.
by mdhughes 8y ago
I'm not hostile, riffing on a cartoon is what humans call "humor". While I have no problem with "Scheme is Spock", I'd put Captain Pike in his beeping wheelchair in the CLISP slot, and Clojure is clearly Kirk:
16.
by mdhughes 8y ago
Right, Scheme is used and those uses are reflected in the spec(s). The minimalism of Scheme is what makes it easier to optimize, but that's not why it's alive. If LISP users want their variant to stay alive as well, they need to f
17.
by mdhughes 8y ago
Scheme moves forward because it's not a rotting corpse as LISP is pictured in that cartoon, it's a still-living language. Scheme's not admired for its purity and historic role, but because it's useful and fast. The R6RS&
18.
by mdhughes 8y ago
While that's what I grew up with, too, it's probably too isolated anymore. Find a cheap laptop or desktop, or a pi, install Python3, and make IDLE easy to reach. For graphics, "import turtle" and later "import tkint
19.
by mdhughes 8y ago
[Chipmunk BASIC]( http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/ ) is a nice console-usable BASIC on most platforms. You can work with it line-numbered, or structured, and has some graphics and sound support in the Mac desktop
20.
by mdhughes 8y ago
Do you want safe, reliable money at the cost of your conscience? Do you want to be one tiny cog in the machine that tracks and annihilates humanity? Choose Google. Do you want adventure, high risk of failure, and being able to live with you
21.
by mdhughes 8y ago
I used elm until late-90s when Y2K looked likely to end it. What I've learned since quitting elm is that mutt was better at processing large mailfiles, and then Apple Mail is easier to automate with AppleScript. This "Elm" is
22.
by mdhughes 8y ago
Why would someone use this instead of IDLE, which ships with Python and does the same things?
23.
by mdhughes 9y ago
When using a new version of a compiler, and existing code stops working, it is often a compiler error. When different compilers give different results, it is often a compiler error. I've hit dozens or hundreds of these, across many lan
24.
by mdhughes 9y ago
See also: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/11/09/enduring-xcode-and-source...
25.
by mdhughes 9y ago
OS X, iOS, and all new APIs consumed by Swift on those platforms are written in Obj-C or C++, never in Swift. So what's "stagnant"? It's true that few others have adopted Objective-C, GNU & MS occasional efforts asid
26.
by mdhughes 9y ago
There's a computer called a Mac, and it's run OS X since 1999-2000, which was NeXTstep back to the 1980s, which is where Objective-C & Cocoa (NS = Next Step) come from. I'm certainly better than average at geometry &
27.
by mdhughes 9y ago
Objective-C code from 30 years ago still compiles and works; many of the NS* APIs still used were stable by then. The tech whims of Kids Today™ don't tell you anything about long-term survival, because they haven't been alive as l
28.
by mdhughes 9y ago
Swift devs keep saying it'll get less fragile, then they rewrite "exceptions", or how strings work, or anything else and all your code has to be fixed line-by-line. I do not believe it'll be stable this decade. Xcode sto
29.
by mdhughes 9y ago
As a Mac and iOS dev since 2005: For long-term survival and maintenance of your software, XIB and autolayout are slow toxins, and Swift is a swift-acting toxin. You won't be able to recompile your Swift code in a year. Or worse, it&#x2
30.
by mdhughes 9y ago
As the former perpetrator of several hand-coded sites and blogs full of text organized by 52-card-pickup principles, going back to '80s BBS's, online services, USENET, and then Gopher and WWW on a University shared network… Switch

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