Xah Programing Blog
Syntactic obsession, imperative despisal, unicode ♥, hacker hate
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Richard Stallman on Common Lisp, 1981
Famous Programers on How Common Lisp Sucks
2014-07-06 xah's thoughts extrempore. On a million dollar of digital books vs paper books.
i was just talking to myself in the past hour about digital book vs paper book. One important, critical thing, about paper books that we don't have in digital books of today is the touch-feely perception. Long story short, with paper books, each has different quality, paper material, weight, smell, etc. Which, are integrated with the book's content in our perception system in our brain. Because, we human animals have adopted to the physical world, the nature, and our brain is adopted to such world, and have developed memory and sensory perceptions to all things we touch or near by. Digital books doesn't have that. You read 100 books all with the same cold screen, same smell, same physical appearance.
most people's love of paper book is idiotic. (which i've covered in the past hour when talking to myself, but too long to rehash it out here so i'll elide) But this quality of paper book i'm speaking of in above paragraph, is critical. It is partly why, we feel that paper books make us actually receive info, and i think it's veribly true. Remember the coffee spots on particular page's content? the dog ears of the page? etc. Those, are integerated with the content in our brain. Maybe you don't recall but your brain's memory system does.
so, it dawn'd on me, how can we make digital books do that? Enterprenurs listen: we need to create digital devices that can emit odor. So, different digital book can create different odor when opened in a computer screen. This way, we get back some touchy-feely advantage of paper books. And, after this, we can improve by having the digital device change its screen texture for different books, etc. But for now, need to get odor.
this idea is copyrighted by Xah Lee. All Rights reserved.
- write a tutorial polyhedron
- check hermann's JavaScript
old unix books
my first unix book was Unix for the Impatient, 1995. By Paul Abrahams and others.
then, a good one is Unix Power Tools by Shelley Powers and others.
and Essential Sys Admin, by Aeleen Frisch , very popular, but is no good.
Sesame Street Pinball Number Count
pinpall, amazing, sesame street production
unicode character bad naming
sometimes the naming in tech is really annoying
you ever heard of anyone call ladybug a lady beetle?
and santa clause becomes Father Christmas, what the hell?
kneeling chair
really want to love them, but bought them and used for over 1 year around 1997. Not really good.
the reason i don't like them is because, i often hop around chair with different positions, sometimes sitting with chest on back rest, sometimes squat on chair, sometimes lotus position.
but with the kneeling chair, your legs are fixed. your upper body, is like a joystick, feeling stressful.
nesting limit of different languages in parsing jason. perl python ruby php rust golang nim C C++ haskell
unicode Cuneiform in macOS Google Chrome problem
problem: html page with unicode cuneiform characters displays well on all browsers in Win10, but on macOS, cuneiform characters shows as blank boxes in Google Chrome, but works in Firefox, safari.
copy and paste the following into a file, name it test.html
<!doctype html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>Cuneiform </title> </head> <body> <mark class="unicode" title="U+12001: CUNEIFORM SIGN A TIMES A">𒀁</mark> </body></html>
on MacOS, open it in Chrome. The cuneiform characters doesn't show. try to make it show, by adding CSS.
question: on macOS safari console , how to find out what font is actually used?
goto this page to see http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_cuneiform.html
major update.
story of sagemath and cocalc
[Should I Resign from My Full Professor Job to Work Fulltime on Cocalc? By William Stein. At http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2019/05/should-i-resign-from-my-full-professor.html ]
every smart phone has a id. IMSI and IMEI
nice video/voice/text chat site
a new lisp: BEL
[a new lisp: BEL By Paul Graham. At http://paulgraham.com/bel.html ]
reading paul graham's bel lang. omg, i find it very silly. Why is paul perpetually enamored with lisp? he's trying to relive 1960s. times has moved on. today we have lots formalism and understanding of logic. i find what he's doing idiotic.
New Researh Shows Microsoft Word Beats Latex
See bottom
Microsoft Bosque Language
golang. join slice of strings to one big string. added to
major interface violation in discord. it should be radio buttons, not checkboxes.
parceljs has very bad doc. unclear how its server start or stop. lots things unexplained. wtf is asset. no explanation on what parcel actually do. now i have to goto 3rd party spam tutorial.
on the other hand, reactjs and yarnjs both have excellent docs.
incorrect English on yarnjs site
[Programming Languages and Lambda Calculi (Utah CS7520 Version) By Matthias Felleisen, Matthew Flatt. At https://www.cs.utah.edu/~mflatt/past-courses/cs7520/public_html/s06/notes.pdf ]
[The Harmful Consequences of Postel's Maxim By Network Working Group, M Thomson, Mozilla. At https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-01.html ]
todo fix golang replace.go printing the find/replace pairs.
golang's type and lowness
golang's type and lowness is starting to get me. whenever you need a list of element that's tuple of diff types, you need to create a type, namely struct.
Golang Tutorial learn Golang in 1 hour
Python 3 Adoption python image lib still no support py3. updated
Combinatorial Unicode Chars
another combinatorial unicode char set is the trigram. Note that, in these MONOGRAM, TRIGRAM, TETRAGRAM, HEXAGRAM, some allows the bar to break into 3 pieces, while other only 2.
ways to order combinatorial patterns
one interesting thing is how do you sort braille? here's 3 possible ways.
Isopsephy puzzle
a=1, b=2, c=3 etc. love = 12+15+22+5=54. find another word that's 54.
great read.
[A Book from Alan Turing… and a Mysterious Piece of Paper By Stephen Wolfram. At https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/08/a-book-from-alan-turing-and-a-mysterious-piece-of-paper/ ]
the story of Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö Ō Ŏ Ő Ɵ Ơ Ǒ Ȍ Ȏ Ȫ Ȭ Ȯ Ȱ Ǫ Ǭ Ø Ǿ Ṍ Ṏ Ṑ Ṓ Ọ Ỏ Ố Ồ Ổ Ỗ Ộ Ớ Ờ Ở Ỡ Ợ
transpose matrix in python
aa = [[1, 2, 3], ['a', 'b', 'c']] bb = [list(col) for col in zip(*aa)] print(bb) # [[1, 'a'], [2, 'b'], [3, 'c']]
aa = [ [1, 2, 3], ['a', 'b', 'c'] ] bb = [[x[i] for x in aa] for i in range(len(aa[0]))] print(bb)
bitcoin ₿ key is 34 chars. is there a standard where to split? like every 5 chars or 10?
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto bitcoin_m4kgn.pdf
Unicode: Greek Alphabet α β γ updated.
Xah Talk Show schedule
ok, finally i have a schedule. Thx to BartholomewJS's incessant prompts. 😇
All time is San Francisco time.
- 2019-08-17 Sat, 10am
- 2019-08-18 Sun, 10am
- 2019-08-19 Mon, 10am
- 2019-08-20 Tue, 10am
- 2019-08-21 Wed, 10am
topic is undecided. But basically the subject is going to be any of:
- unicode
- emacs tips
- emacs lisp live coding + tutorial
- JavaScript live coding + tutorial
- keyboard
- programing language
go YouTube xahlee sub + 🔔
math font converter
lol, this thread. twitter FakeUnicode
but am thinking, perhaps it's the other way round. 𝔰𝔬𝔣𝔱𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔢 𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔲𝔩𝔡 𝔰𝔲𝔭𝔭𝔬𝔯𝔱 𝔲𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔡𝔢 𝔪𝔞𝔱𝔥 𝔣𝔬𝔫𝔱. and it's a matter of time.
things evolve. once the 𝔲𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔡𝔢 𝔪𝔞𝔱𝔥 𝔣𝔬𝔫𝔱 𝔠𝔥𝔞𝔯𝔰 is out of the door, people use it however they like, just like 🤷. Even mathematicians, few would know the difference of ∆ Δ ∂ δ ∑ Σ µ μ.
gitorious.org cert expired. probably a ghost town by now.
Chinese Prosperity Symbols
added to Unicode Cultural Religious Symbols ☭
Christian Feast Symbols
there is these: 🕃 🕄 , meaning Orthodox typicon symbol for lower rank feast.
also 🕀 🕁 🕂. Apparently, there's Orthodox Church, and has ranking of feasts.
and there is 🕅, meaning Orthodox typicon symbol for difficult sections. Apparently used for bible reading or something.
added to Unicode Cultural Religious Symbols ☭
Om Symbol, in Hinduism and Buddhism
🕉 OM SYMBOL. Meaning Almighty God in Hinduism. See also: Unicode Devanagari अ
and here's a 🕉 Om chant song 六字真言頌 six-syllabled Sanskrit mantra “Om mani padme hum”
here's om in tamil: ௐ Unicode Tamil அ
perl6 unicode operators
that guy, Vladimir Voevodsky, i think spend only few years and invented homotopy type theory. So i think one have a chance getting acquainted with the whole logic/proof/foundation if reading say 2 hours for 4 years. Much thanks to @johncarlosbaez for showing me much math.
Unicode BISMILLAH
﷽
added to Unicode Arabic ش
note the word bismillah is in the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody Queen ♪ Bohemian Rhapsody
Category Theorists, Do You Speak Formal Logic?
my complaint about category theory: On wikipedia, even graduate level math subjects, are well written with formal definition given. If i persist, i can see myself understand it after days. Not so with category theory.
e.g. Wikipedia category theory page doesn't give proper definition (maybe it's there, but typically hard to tell). Then, category books tend to talk chapters after chapter informally and drag in lots of wishy washy analogies. i lost patience.
xah talk show 2019-08-01 programing languages and their culture. perl python ruby
JavaScript, why there's no "use js2015" pragma to clean up the language?
binary, hexadecimal, converter (added a tutorial)
camelCase vs snake_case (updated)
See also: Computer Languages Characters Frequency
Perl Books Survey 2002 (updating some dead links)
programing language where you can copy paste any function anywhere
i really want a language where you can copy paste any function definition in any project and use in another project. doesn't seem to exist. For this to work, the function param must encode any dependency, of global var and libs.
for text processing, golang code is 1.5 or 2 times longer than python
for text processing, golang code is 1.5 or 2 times longer than python. python is about 1.5 times longer than emacs lisp.
elisp is shorter due to elisp designed for text processing. no need to deal with bytes, encoding, opening file, file handle, etc, even backup is just turn on a var. and one has cursor position, buffer etc.
python is shorter than golang due to golang is lower level, and typed. much more declaration, handling low level stuff, byte/string conversion, and notorious golang error checking problem.
See also: Text Processing: Emacs Lisp vs Perl
Unix Pipe as Functional Language (minor update)
LISP, What Does Symbolic Language Mean? (Finished update.)
video of Daniel Friedman. programing language researcher
https://vimeo.com/161794995 that's Daniel Friedman, one of the few experts on programing language design. haven't seen him before. #lisp #scheme
programing lang design is mostly a community of amateurs. Because, it has relatively little practical value and little theoretical value, in contrast to actual coding or math.
Xah Talk 2019-07-19 lisp syntax, sexp, meta-expression, Mathematica, meaning of sugar syntax
nested heterogenus data in typed lang. Or, important json data to golang.
run into a problem with golang, or typed lang in general. In json, or python ruby perl JavaScript, you can have arbitrary nested map/array. In golang, you can't due to types. you have to declare or create the structure before hand. How's this done? going to look into.
@kerukeion right. but the issue to me seems to be the declaration part. e.g. i was coding a script, in python etc i'd just code the nesting. But in go, seems i need to first think about, design, then declare, the structure first. am now wondering, when importing json, what does go json lib do? gonna look into.
began to read #golang json lib
https://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/
incomprehensible.
In python you just
python_obj = json.loads(str)
in JavaScript you just
js_obj = JSON.parse(str)
This is interesting issue about typed lang importing structure from dynamic lang.
todo. read about unicode 12
golang tried to have a try
golang tried to have a try https://github.com/golang/go/issues/32437
if golang start to have a try or even the jargon “exception”, i'll stop using golang. i'd rather type if err != nil { panic(err) } every 10 lines.
todo. to read. https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/SliceTricks
todo
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/pipes-4.3.11/docs/Pipes-Tutorial.html
Proliferation of Computing Languages updated.
in APL, A ⍟ B means Logarithm of B to base A. I think APL's symbolic operators rather idiotic.
todo. question for haskell coders. Say I need to gen a list of file paths, 50k of them. I can var global mylist; and f(root) to populate it. But if f is pure function we do mylist = f(root), it double memory requirement. How does pure func lang code this?
todo move conicsEtynomogy.txt
fuck emoji
youtube-dl --update, be careful!
when you use youtube-dl --update you have to be careful. because who knows if author changed or got brought out.
haskell making invalid state not representable by type
- haha, nice try. The last item is a pipe dream.
- actually, it's impossibe to always auto fix error too.
- in fact, nor is it possible to always suggest fix.
- Gussing what's wrong can't be done neither.
- Actually any semantic program logic error can't be fixed by language.
- by god, syntactic error is theoretically impossible to remove too when you move semantics into syntax such as haskell.
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