Disqus - Latest Comments for John F.

Re: noah = angry

John F. — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:03:12 -0000

Noah is the man. Preach that gospel, brother.

Re: tired

John F. — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 06:01:07 -0000

So yeah, I'm out on Maui, and pidgin is what they do here. That's da kine, brah. Shaka unless you want beef. Etc.
Cool stuff.

Re: LINQ’s query syntax was created to make me angry

John F. — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 06:19:51 -0000

Query syntax looks moronic. Nice Thanksgiving metaphor there at the beginning.

Re: “value”

John F. — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:49:31 -0000

Just letting you know, Plan 9 has had essentially the same functionality as Time Machine built in for years.
9fs dump
cd /n/dump/2007/6/15/usr/john
bam, I'm in my home directory as of June 2007. Backing up only the changed blocks is the winner.

Re: Eric Meijer invented dumb.

John F. — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 13:08:25 -0000

Haha, I can't believe he tried to claim the REPL of all things. What's next? VB invented the GUI? Invented whitespace?

Re: the keyboard/mouse and “bandwidth”

John F. — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:29:40 -0000

#ifdef ADVOCACY
Regarding the keyboard/mouse idea, I would say that a system must either provide keyboard shortcuts OR allow the user to accomplish almost any function in a small number of mouse-clicks. I personally enjoy a Plan 9 editor called "acme"; although there are very few keyboard shortcuts besides ^E for end of line, ^A for beginning, and left & right arrows to move one character at a time, it allows you to compose and run ed/sam-style editing commands on any selected text, easily pipe it through external programs, etc. Basically, my only desire would be for ^F and ^P to move forward and backward instead of the arrow keys; the interface allows me to work quickly enough without extensive shortcuts.
For example, to replace all instances of "foo" with "bar" in a paragraph, I just highlight the paragraph, move my mouse to the file tag-line, type "Edit s/foo/bar/g" and mid-click it. It may take a bit longer than vi, but the command remains for later editing/use, which helps reduce time spent later.

The paper is a bit old, but interesting: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme.html
#endif /*ADVOCACY*/

Re: the keyboard/mouse and “bandwidth”

John F. — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:13:16 -0000

I agree that the worst part of it is moving your hands to the mouse and getting the cursor to the right place, moving back to the keyboard to type the command, and then switching back to the mouse again to select and execute the command, but I also find it convenient in its own way.
I use acme exclusively for editing on Plan 9 and emacs or vi for editing on UNIX. I don't work with Windows if I can help it but vim is the preferred option there too.

Re: I’m afraid of low level programming.

John F. — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:05:45 -0000

Hey Nick, didn't I point you to that "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" post when I was on a particularly anti-OO kick?
Anyway, I'm currently doing Plan 9 kernel hacking and stuff in C and assembly (x86, amd64, and PPC), and I've got to say it's pretty great. I highly suggest that you dig into C some more, and it truly can be fun to play with assembly.
I can't say I agree with Michael's comment that you may never use a pointer in anger--if you do ANY non-trivial C programming, expect to use them a lot because they're one of the most useful things in C. I do, however, second his recommendation that you read K&R, dabble in assembly, and get familiar with the bourne shell (sh). Try AWK if you ever have some text processing to do; I've recently discovered how incredibly powerful it can be, especially when combined with sed and grep.

Oh, and learn Lisp.