Notices by amen zwa, esq. (amenzwa@mathstodon.xyz)

@The_Whore_of_Blahbylon
💕

@amszmidt
Right, UNIX certainly isn't LISP Machine or Smalltalk Machine, for sure.

It is forgivable that UNIX didn't have any of these creature comforts that later systems offer, given that it came about in 1969 on a PDP-7 and a teletype. What is unforgivable is how UNIX's modern descendants essentially remained in that mid-60s time-sharing mentality, at their core.

I don't have a better solution to offer; I just moan.😧

PS—Years ago (in the late 1980s), a younger kid accosted me about ed's "stupid line editing", comparing ed to his favourite vi, which he uses on his SPARCstation with X Window. I explained to him that just a decade ago, many users couldn't afford the expensive VT100 to run vi, and were still using the old teletypes. And there is no need for the VDU screen, when there is a wide, long roll of paper displaying all the code, at once.🤣

#UNIX is not just an OS; it is the ultimate #IDE for #programmers. Arguably the best written introductory book on UNIX programming is "The UNIX Programming Environment", Kernighan (1983). This book covers UNIX V7, but I used it with 4.2BSD.

There is another jewel of a book of a similar kind, a free one to boot, by Prof. Ballesteros (King Juan Carlos University): "Introduction to Operating Systems Abstractions Using Plan 9 from Bell Labs" (2007). Prof. Ballesteros wrote this book to teach his CS students the fundamentals of good OS design.

Although almost no one uses #Plan9 today, it is alive and kicking. It even runs on Raspberry Pi. Anyone interested in OSs and likes the philosophical underpinnings of UNIX should take a look at Plan 9.

The other must-read book is his "Notes on the Plan 9 3ed Kernel Source" (2007). It is a Lions-style commentary.

Prof. Ballesteros has many Plan 9 related publications in PDF format.

https://lsub.org/books-papers/

PS—Those with a historical bent should also read Organick's "The Multics System: An Examination of Its Structure" (1980). Multix is the mother of UNIX, and Plan 9 is the grown-up UNIX.

The #Computing #Lifecycle

• Upon the discovery of assembly, the electronics engineer comes to understand the power of software plasticity (and also the ubiquity of software bugs).
• Upon the discovery of C, the assembly programmer comes to understand the dexterity of high-level languages.
• Upon the discovery of 𝜆-calculus, the Turing Machine programmer comes to understand the superiority of the declarative functional programming paradigm over the imperative procedural programming paradigm, especially on modern, multi-CPU, multi-core hardware.
• Upon the discovery of AI-powered Python, the functional programmer comes to understand the futility of it all, and dejectedly reverts to hardware hacking.

#FutileFriday

These writings of mine say a lot more about me than a brief self-introduction post could:

• My article on the slide rule, its design, its uses, and my experiences with it as an electrical #engineering undergraduate a long time ago
https://amenzwa.github.io/stem/ComputingHistory/HowSlideRulesWork/

• My proposal to modernise Fortran, which presents my views on #programming, type systems, and linguistic ergonomics
https://amenzwa.github.io/stem/PL/FortranModernisation/

• My protest against those who weaponise the #law to hurt fellow human beings
https://amenzwa.github.io/law/SchemersAndDreamers/

• My book on #motorsports strategy, tactics, car setup, race car dynamics, and track learning, based on the Assetto Corsa VR racing simulator
https://tinyurl.com/f63nd9pw

• My book for wind instrument #musicians, describing how to set up and play the Akai EWI5000 wind synthesiser
https://tinyurl.com/mr2csn6u

#mechanisation of intellectual tasks:

• slide rule—relieved the burden upon the intellectual by replacing the tedious, error-prone manual manipulation of numbers and logarithm tables with a slide-and-cursor mechanism
• calculator—relieved the burden upon the intellectual by replacing the tedious, error-prone manual manipulation of the slide and the cursor of the slide rule with the fully automatic calculator
• computer—relieved the burden of the human computers by replacing the slide rule and the calculator with the fully automatic digital computer
• web search engine— relieved the burden of the intellectual by replacing tedious, error-prone manual search of print journals and books in the library with the fully automatic web search engine
• automated theorem provers—relieved the burden upon the mathematicians by replacing the tedious, error-prone manual proofs of low-level steps with the fully automatic proof checker
• #AI code generator—relieved the programmer of his brain, by replacing once-intellectual tasks with thoughtless, menial button pushes

@brouhaha I think these devices pretend to be inanimate when the user wants them to perform their designed tasks, but they’re very proactive and animated when they’re collecting the user’s personal information and reporting back to Ma.

@brouhaha A few decades back, UNIX and UNIX-like OSs were a small safe haven. Now, pencil-and-paper is the only safe place left.

Fabrice #Bellard is the French code monster who created QEMU, FFmpeg, Tiny C, and tonnes of other highly influential, highly efficient programmes.

But his 2002 IOCCC-winning Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler—a 2048-byte-long, self-hosting C #compiler—is special, even in the company of his other inventions.

https://bellard.org/otcc/

For decades, I've enjoyed, admired, and adored the #Omega #Speedmaster, the watch that NASA relied on, along with the Pickett N600 slide rule, on their moon missions. But it was, is, and will always be a humble, reliable "tool watch", one with a Velcro strap, a shatter-proof (cheap, but zero-gravity-safe) hesalite crystal, and a comparatively-simple, manual-wind Calibre 321/861 movement.

Now, Omega is making hyper-rare, meteorite-faced Moonwatch; steel-gold two-tone Speedster; diamond-studded jewellery; a co-axial escapement version; MoonSwatch fashion piece—all rather pointless and pretentious.

@weekend_editor Of course—Emacs! Oh, by the way, it is a truth universal that programmers of our generation did partake in such battles about editors, code formats, data formats, .... But not many condescend themselves to haggle over time complexity of algorithms, efficacy of cache algorithms, and other "trivial" matters. Grand was our times.🤣

@vnikolov @amszmidt

@amszmidt I adore Haskell; I'm sure you know that. But this is a kind of insightful statement that I can cite in cultured society. It is truer still, when one gets his knickers caught in the wheels of lazy evaluation.👍 😍

@weekend_editor

@amszmidt @weekend_editor 🤣

@weekend_editor Most assuredly. I went to ML from LISP, and when I started out, the ML programmers had to smack me round my head many times, before I straightened up—a bit.

@amszmidt

@weekend_editor
Exactly! In my case, I landed in the ML pile after having treaded upon assembly, FORTRAN, LISP, C, Pascal, and Smalltalk to varying degrees of shallowness. So, ML was definitely cool.

I bet you had loads of fun during your stint at the ML compiler maker. In those days, I only had access to academic ML compilers, like Cardelli VAX ML.

Today, if we tell a young IT practitioner, "Back in our days, we had to buy compilers", he'd laugh us out of the building, and the town.

@amszmidt

@weekend_editor Yeah, Haskell (and to an even great extent, Agda) can, at times, be a very sharp double edge blade with a needle-point tip. The unexpected generality often wreaks my head.

By the way, every Haskeller I know adores Hughes's "Why FP" paper, but far fewer folks talk about Hutton's "fold" paper. But I often rave about Hutton's paper.

https://people.cs.nott.ac.uk/pszgmh/fold.pdf

Graham told me, once, that he originally titled this paper "fold", but had to lengthen it on a vehement objection of the editor. I'd have been very cool indeed to have had that succinct title.😎

@amszmidt

@amszmidt 🤣 A true practitioner's insight, that! 😍

@weekend_editor

@weekend_editor
Oh ho! I hadn't heard that pre-` excuse before. It's brilliant; I'm stealing it.😀

@amszmidt

The strange thing about #LISP #Scheme #programmers—McCarthy, Minsky, Steele, Sussman, Friedman, Dybvig, and tonnes of others—is that they all seemed to have been born with fully developed and #functional brains.

Or perhaps habitually thinking and working in this #programming language turned them into such “aliens”.

Or both?🤔

First set of images from the new #VeraCRubin #telescope in Chile

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj3rmjjgx6xo