Notices by Paolo Amoroso (amoroso@fosstodon.org)

A quick update on the Fosstodon situation.

Many are soliciting an official statement by the Fosstodon team which I hope will come soon. Before taking a decision I'll see what the admins of the original instance that announced the defederation will have to say, as well as the thoughts of the community.

Meanwhile I'm still researching alternate instances.

@amoroso 👆 An important clarification. For the time being only one instance announced the intention of defederating Fosstodon, i.e. scholar.social:

https://scholar.social/@socrates/114398529586604508

Or at least this is the only one I've heard so far. At first I was confused and thought the scope of defederation was wider.

Update: more Mastodon instances are announcing they're defederating Fosstodon:

https://mathstodon.xyz/@EdS/114400267816280788

I've just learned my instance Fosstodon is going to be defederated. Details in this post and the links shared from there:

https://scholar.social/@socrates/114398529586604508

While I consider what to do I'll suspend posting until I take a decision. Migrating is easy but wouldn't transfer my 6.3K online posts, an invaluable resource for me. Whatever happens, I have a federated blog: @paolo

I love Mastodon and the community, my deepest thanks to every one of you for the amazing conversations and support. I'm devastated.

This post nicely captures why AWK is such a delightful and effective little language:

"A minimum of features liberates creativity. When there is only one way to do something, you don’t spend a lot of time choosing that very way."

https://maximullaris.com/awk.html

#awk #linux

Joe Marshall presents an insightful angle for thinking about Lisp parentheses and their benefits such as making refactoring easier.

https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/04/lisp-programs-dont-have-parentheses.html

#lisp #CommonLisp

I chewed on the tasty food for thought of the blog series by Ramin Honary @ramin_hal9001 on how Emacs fulfills the Unix philosophy. If a Lisp system is extensible, customizable, and self-documenting by design I'd say it's an application platform, or pretty close.

https://tilde.town/~ramin_hal9001/articles/emacs-fulfills-the-unix-philosophy.html

Ramin, @sacha Sacha Chua, and @screwtape will elaborate on this in an upcoming episode of the Lispy Gopher show. Full context:

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@screwtape/114225644895007169

#emacs #lisp #unix

In a system that is Lisp all the way down like Medley Interlisp you get scripting for free. Pretty much everything has a Lisp API that can be called or inputs data.

Here I inserted in the TEdit rich text editor a table of square roots formatted by a short user function evaluated in the REPL at the top left, and a datestamp returned by evaluating the DATE system function in the small input box (evaled as soon as the right parenthesis is typed, so omitted for clarity).

#interlisp #lisp

I'm having a lot of fun running some graphics demos on my Cardputer uLisp machine.

Surface of rotation of two functions
http://www.ulisp.com/show?3GPX

Barnsley Fern
http://www.ulisp.com/show?44WD

My experience with the Cardputer:

https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/tag:Cardputer

#ulisp #lisp #cardputer

A good workaround finally allows me to use the Cardputer uLisp Machine, a lovely card-sized microcontroller system that runs uLisp. If any Emacs wizard has any advice on how to fix the remaining minor echo issue mentioned in the post, I'm interested.

https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/paoloamoroso/making-ulisp-more-usable-on-the-cardputer

#cardputer #ulisp #lisp

Bill Dyer's memories of the Coherent Unix clone.

At $99.95, in the early 1990s it was the first Unix I could afford and run on my laptop. It taught me a lot. It was a product from an era in which you could pay a one-time fee to buy and own good, packaged software that delivered real value and came with excellent printed documentation.

https://itsfoss.com/coherent-operating-system

#unix #retrocomputing

👆 Congrats @libreoffice on achieving 400 million downloads of the LibreOffice desktop productivity suite.

@VnPower Lisp has been used since the early 1960s for pioneering work on computer algebra systems, see for example Macsyma:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma

Since people new to the Fediverse are joining lately, it's a good occasion to share again my tips for overcoming the empty timeline barrier by seeding and populating your Mastodon feeds in a world with no algorithms:

https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/how-i-populate-my-mastodon-feed

#mastodon #fediverse

@simendsjo I second the recommendation of McCLIM not much for the specific features of CLIM itself, but for the original ideas it brings with respect to more traditional GUI frameworks and toolkits.

@michaelc

A reminder that if we love RSS it's not enough to use feed readers ourselves. We also need to reach out to our favorite blogs and sources to advocate for access to feeds.

Many websites and blogs don't provide RSS feeds, even those by organizations and projects that do want to disseminate information and do outreach.

https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/ive-been-advocating-for-rss-support-and-you-should-too

#rss

I wanted to write a network program in Interlisp but Medley's TCP/IP stack doesn't work. So I cheated.

This is how I managed to write a Finger client in Interlisp. When I tested the program Ben Brown @benbrown may have noticed my traffic to his great Happy Net Box public Finger server (thanks!).

https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/paoloamoroso/interpinkie-a-finger-client-in-interlisp

#finger #interlisp #lisp

"Lisp isn’t the per­fect pro­gram­ming lan­guage: it is the _best sub­strate_ for _your_ per­fect pro­gram­ming lan­guage."

From:

On: Lisp, On Lisp, and My­self
https://b.pyrope.net/on-lisp

#lisp #CommonLisp

SQLite is a remarkable piece of software and I've always been curious about the system and the project. Here are several little known facts about SQLite.

https://avi.im/blag/2024/sqlite-facts

#SQLite #database

@evilworld I actually don't know.

@peertube

Sepia Search is a @peertube search engine which searches across almost a thousand PeerTube instances. I checked it out only briefly but it seems pretty good.

https://sepiasearch.org

#PeerTube #fediverse