vincent-manis

4 ms·

1.
by vincent-manis 5d ago
Back around 1968, I did some work on an IBM 1130 (small-scale 16-bit computer, definitely not a minicomputer, as it filled most of a room). The disk drive was driven by a voice coil, and made an audible click as the head moved from one trac
2.
by vincent-manis 16d ago
I use Tk routinely in Scheme; there is no Tcl in my code, but Tk is a very nice (though basic) GUI kit, and my programs work on Linux, BSD, MacOS, and Windows. Other commenters have mentioned that Python ships with Tkinter, a library module
3.
by vincent-manis 24d ago
I have nothing to say on the merits of Khan Academy (I have never looked at it, nor have I known anyone taking a course), but from 35 years of teaching, I know that we mostly learn by doing. It's why university courses have labs, probl
4.
by vincent-manis 24d ago
A correction. I can find no evidence of a Unix v2 at Berkeley, it looks like it was v4. (I was told long ago by someone who was at Berkeley then that they had had v2, but there is no evidence of this in the usual sources of information.)
5.
by vincent-manis 25d ago
My vague recollection is that the kernel in Unix v2 (still called UNIX in those days) was written in assembly language, but that many of the commands were written in B. Because B was interpretive on the PDP-11 (it suffered from the same pro
6.
by vincent-manis 29d ago
s/dark side/far side/
7.
by vincent-manis 1mo ago
I tried to use Vim once, and found that none of the Emacs keybindings worked there. Seriously, learning x86 assembly language is easier than trying to grasp that INSANELY bad keyboard layout.
8.
by vincent-manis 1mo ago
I would never buy a kit that required soldering, because I'm terrible at it. But I like putting things together. I've assembled a couple of DIY keyboards, and I bought a Framework 12 laptop. It doesn't take too long (Framewor
9.
by vincent-manis 1mo ago
er, no, it was licensed, but available to educational institutions. I remember having to send Bell Labs our university calendar when i wanted to get a copy of LSI-11 Unix circa 1976. What is true is that Ken Thompson visited a number of pla
10.
by vincent-manis 1mo ago
There are 2 more that I would add, both books I read as an undergraduate nearly 60 years ago. First, Marvin Minsky's Computation: Finite And Infinite Machines (published 60 years ago). Not the latest word in automata theory, but as a f
11.
by vincent-manis 1mo ago
There are a number of image-based Scheme systems. Chibi Scheme and Chez Scheme come to mind. In both, you can save an image and reload it at a later time, though for very good reasons, most people start each session with a fresh copy of the
12.
by vincent-manis 1mo ago
I for one really appreciate Caps Lock. I always remap it as Compose.
13.
by vincent-manis 2mo ago
SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someone learning Scheme. (But SICP will turn some of the people on
14.
by vincent-manis 2mo ago
Until the threat of anti-trust against IBM, and the latter's decision to “unbundle” its software from its hardware, in 1969. There had been proprietary software before that, but very little horizontal software (OSs, development tools,
15.
by vincent-manis 2mo ago
I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way multiple inheritance in C++ game code). If I were running a L
16.
by vincent-manis 2mo ago
I have no opinion on the validity of this claim, but I do know that many students do not read things. I taught university level computer science for over 30 years. On midterms, I would embed phrases such as “print OKAPI on the top of page 2
17.
by vincent-manis 2mo ago
One of the best labs I ever did in university (this was circa 1970), was to create an Initial Program Load (bootstrap) program for a virtual IBM System/360, which copied punch cards, using no OS assistance. (Modern zSeries I/O is
18.
by vincent-manis 2mo ago
Tk without Tcl?
19.
by vincent-manis 2mo ago
Burgess reputedly disliked the American edition's inclusion of a glossary. I'm in partial agreement with that.The right way to read it is to let the language flow over you, and you gradually start making sense of it. The glossary
20.
by vincent-manis 2mo ago
I second the recommmendation, for these two systems with a caveat. MIT Scheme has not been made to run on Apple Silicon, though with a few tricks, the amd64 version is usable on a modern Mac (this will presumably go away once Apple takes a
21.
by vincent-manis 2mo ago
I always got a chuckle when Stargate went meta. They had a planet called Kelowna (a real BC city) and a country called Langara (I was for a time a faculty member at Langara College). At one point, they visit an Oregon town called Steveston,
22.
by vincent-manis 3mo ago
Tectonic would be more convincing if the authors wrote their documentation in LaTeX, rather than Markdown (and I do know about Pandoc).
23.
by vincent-manis 4mo ago
I did that kind of thing when I first started using C (my attitude then was that C was fine, but it should have looked more like BCPL). I stopped after a short time.
24.
by vincent-manis 4mo ago
That could well be, the article is still wrong.
25.
by vincent-manis 4mo ago
I was puzzled by this claim, too. I think that the article is wrong, and that the code is written in HAL/S, a NASA-only language that sort of started off as a preprocessor to Fortran, though it has some PL/I-like features. If it r
26.
by vincent-manis 4mo ago
I have a Shinobi, and like it, but I recently got an HHKB Studio w, and really like it too.
27.
by vincent-manis 4mo ago
So who became Xerox? (i.e., brilliant ideas, thrown away at the corporate level)
28.
by vincent-manis 5mo ago
Versioned files existed in Tenex, developed by Bolt Beranek and Newman in the early 1970s; version numbering was based on a similar feature in MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System. DEC's variant of Tenex was eventually called TOP
29.
by vincent-manis 5mo ago
This is great...I would encourage you to add the ability for users to offer new languages. I noticed that Modula-2, PL/I, Trac Language, ALGOL 60, ALGOL68, and Joss/Focal could be added. (ALGOL 60 would be a challenge, as the orig
30.
by vincent-manis 5mo ago
Actually, variations on M-expressions have been created many times in the Lisp world. (Look what you can do with macros!) So far, none of them has caught on. The latest attempt for Scheme is SRFI-266, which creates a very nice infix express

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