Notices by Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)

"Evaluating Human Factors Beyond Lines of Code" by @tonofcrates.
https://blog.sigplan.org/2024/11/21/evaluating-human-factors-beyond-lines-of-code/

A while ago I had a Twitter thread encouraging people to write more books. @neeldhara urged me to turn it into a proper blog post, and I just have: "You Too Can Write a Book!"

https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/write-a-book/

@landley I too grunt (like @robpike), but when I'm in a more friendly mood, I instead go "Ahoy, ahoy!", because that's how Alexander Graham Bell answered the phone. It serves the same purpose as a grunt or "potato" but has the added edge of letting you pass on an anecdote to your caller if they're a good person to hear it.

@inthehands @chrisamaphone Well played.

@rk @inthehands @chrisamaphone But to do this properly the prologue would have to be written by the system.

Good advice not only in life but also in formal semantics.

@inthehands @stephstephking I completely agree re. writing, but there are ways to teach writing without an English department. The average CS major may learn more from the "writing across the curriculum" model than from the Brönte's.

(Skin in the game: When it was smaller, I had my programming languages course designated a writing course, and a personally read and gave feedback on everything written. And boy did they need a lot.)

@tealeg Given that Pyret's primary audience is people learning to program, we should actually default the other way around: colors are more familiar to them than trig.

We could also stick an extra `u` in the middle in the High British fashion, e.g., make one of them "taun", and hope we have no Scots users (though it would be on point given the language's naming tradition).

Today in programming language design issues…

How it started: How it's going:

This is so real. Trying to use Google Drive from an app-like program has become an endless headache.
https://ia.net/topics/our-android-app-is-frozen-in-carbonite

Saw this recently; as it pulled away, it emitted a mighty ROAR, too. Jurassic Pahk, as they say around here. #RIpix

Baseball's parent, cricket, has entered the chat.

Tennis is funny. Most players are lean, mean, sinewy machines, and then there's Rohan Bopanna, who looks like your typical uncle who plays at the Bangalore Club. Who just happens to be world #1 at doubles. With the funniest LinkedIn.

My colleague Amy Greenwald just sent me this talk slide. It's from Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an *economist*.

We have so won.

(I mean, I have *thoughts* about this content and his course slides, but also… We have so won.)

@tealeg It's okay, we've already contributed massively to bringing down the economy in other ways. (-:

1/ I have a story about WordStar from the mid-80s. I was in high school, and was blown away by it. Not just because it was fast, light, and good, but also because my BASIC brain *could not figure how to represent the data in a word processor*. I was OBSESSED about this. ↵
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/06/wordstar_7_the_last_ever/

2/ Hope came from an unexpected quarter. My school bought 2-3 machines from a local company. The machines had almost nothing: like CP/M, a BASIC interpreter, and…their rudimentary clone of WordStar! Someone working a few blocks from my school had written a word processor!!! ↵

3/ Now, how was I going to get them to talk to me? Here, it helped that they were alums, and it was the kind of school (SJBHS in BLR) whose alums were called Old Boys, if you catch my drift. So I wangled an invite to their offices. They were very nice. ↵

4/ I finally popped the big question: in effect, how do you represent the data in a word processor? I didn't know big-O or anything, but I had big-O intuitions that told me it couldn't possibly be any of the BASIC representations I could come up with. ↵