Xah Programing Blog Archive 2018-05

suddenly, i have a feeling, that virtual reality with goggle will be going nowhere. as opposed to, in every house hold. Rather, 3d projection will be everywhere, when that tech comes about.

2018-07-12

all you don't want to know about lisp

Xah On Lisp

and

lisp mistake. “The definition of quote is broken. I personally explained it to John McCarthy. He agreed” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12112800, 2016-07-18, by dogfishbar
Wikipedia Fexpr Fexpr
[on lisp fexpr 2011-04-06 By John Shutt. At https://fexpr.blogspot.com/2011/04/fexpr.html ]

2018-07-12 thx to Timofey Lagutin https://twitter.com/nuopnu

2018-07-11

Jargon REPL and Hackers

2018-07-11

Guy Steele Says: Don't Iterate, Recurse, and Get rid of lisp cons!

old article. minor update

2018-07-10

programing languages traps for hackers

in programing languages, uncommon features are traps for hacker types. Hip coders form undue obsession about 'em. e.g. lisp symbols, macros, read syntax, advice. haskell of such is monad, currying. Unusual features is also cult brewing.

most hip love of lisp features r wrong.

macros complicates code logic, harder read/write.
symbols vs string. symbols pollutes obarray.
advice complicates code logic, thwart expectation, harder debug.
lisp read syntax ≈ useless. hobs progress in builtin parser.

2018-07-10

Duckduckgo Censor Results

2018-07-09

Python: Append String in Loop

2018-07-09

now we have machines that emulate various animation insect flights mechanisms. there r few major categories by mechanism: birds, insects. birds: eagle, seagull, sparrow, hummingbird. house fly, dragon fly, butterfly, beetle.

should we include sting-ray as flying? depends. one is air, one is water. In physics, they are both fluid dynamics. But due to density, the mechanism and flight property, is significantly different. If we include, then we have types such as: dolphin, shark, ray, even octopus et al.

more generally, there are all considered locomotion. that is, how a animal propels. so what's the diff between “flight” and “walk/run”. The essence, is one is based on fluid dynamics, vs friction.

why are we interested in flight here? because, the various mechanisms of birds/insects, are interesting with respect to engineering. but note, walk/run is also quite interesting mathematically, in that the number of legs, and “gaits”, have diff properties and limits.

for flight, some of the top interesting properties is can it: hover, glide, fly backward, agility, speed, lift power, enegy efficiency. For ground based locomotion, some are: stability, speed, agility, power, carrying capacity, efficiency, terrain, control complexity.

2018-07-09

Jamie Zawinski (jwz) vs Xah Lee Twitter Spat

2018-07-06

1920x1200 monitor

1920x1200 monitor is nice! extra 200 px gives you 10 more lines. Doesn't seem much, but for coding that's quite useful. Normally, it's 1920x1080. You can find out your resolution at JS: Find Window Size and buy it.

Dell U2415 24 Inch 1920 Monitor Buy at amazon

[see Xah Monitor 2021: ASUS Pro Art Display PA278QV]

2018-06-24

YouTube Shows Blank for Deleted Video

It used to be, when you visit a YouTube video that's gone, YouTube says why. e.g. Deleted, went private, account violation gone. Now, it's just a blank.

2018-06-24

Google Forcing HTTPS

[Google and HTTP 2018-02-24 By Dave Winer. At http://this.how/googleAndHttp/ ]

google is now the biggest skummbag on earth. it wants $, and full control. Dave Winer is an asssshooole. but i agree with his say here. i have 5 domains. https would increase $ burden a lot for me. Its effect is wipe out all small players.

i've voiced against google forcing https, but quite a few nerds don't agree. about security, google chrome browser would be the number 1 problem. if google does backdoor, nobody will know, and they r the biggest octopus wrapping the globe from underground to outer space.

2018-06-19

one of the problem of writing JavaScript svg math grahph plotter, is the canvas size problem.

2018-06-19

Linux by Command Line
new nav panel on the side

2018-06-18

Git: What's HEAD

git, and its doc, is the prototypical think of programers, like C unix lineage, it's the most incomprehensible, to mathematicians, to logicians, to laymen. Only other programers can understand it, by means of “grok”.

Mathematicians remove anything unnecessary. What's left is the pure abstract substance. programers and their writing, moves around things with semi algorithm. Sometimes recipe like, sometimes lose definition. The land of the middle brain.

2018-06-17

i propose, that big endian should be henceforth called the natural byte order.

2018-06-17

design pattern dead

There isn't much mentioning of design pattern these days. I suppose it's dead since ~2012. It reigned for a decade, since 2000. Reaching its pinnacle around 2007.

Why Software Suck. written in 2001. Why Software Suck

2018-06-16

Hack of Bitmask as Boolean Parameters

2018-06-16

isn't JavaScript the greatest language

In coding, there is lots frustrations. After you get old, you knew, the main problem cause, is the corporations, enterprise. However, the story is impossible to tell, due to social forces.

In html, one major problem is that it's hard to find the matching end tag. Usually, they are all ＜/div＞. One solution, is to allow arbitrary tags. e.g. ＜x70612＞something＜/x70612＞. This is beginning to be espoused, but killed by html5 fckkks.

Recall, xml rose as a fix of 20 years of sgml html mistakes. With streamlined syntax. Html5, was mostly Apple and opera, e.g. They want canvas for iphone for game for $$$. There are tons of articles written about the controversies, but, they are now history. When you try to say it, nobody cares.

For 12 years i blogged about ills of html xml css stuff. But realized, all the articles are just buried. It makes no sense to repost them. And it's hard to find the thousands of articles about them by others. All buried, as, “history”. Young people, only knew about current fad n bitches.

The ill of all this, the driving force, is really, just $. From each programer, to standard bodies such as w3c and wtfg, corps. If some tech is really good but makes no $ for nobody, it'll dieee.

So programing languages, is like the outcome of a cellular automata, just like other social things. That's why all lang r like total fkkcdp n extremely complex. Handful clean ones, from academia, no force to bubble them up.

Am starting to see, young people claiming they love javascript, or that js is a great language. Now, you feel old, too. Lol. Now, try to tell them things. Experience no communication.

Meanwhile, ten thousand corporations, libs, frameworks, etc, are shooting fireworks daily about how great JavaScript is, how modern it is, how universal it is, beautiful, with their libs, framework, ide, browser, engine, methodologies, things they peddle.

When you are a young coder, say, 20, that's all you hear. Sure, now and then you'll hear history of things. Some, would be curious and look. But, history is like a shroud. You don't really know it unless you wore it.

2018-06-13

New York Times ASCII Art

2018-06-05

Abacus

2018-05-31

camelCase vs snake_case

2018-05-30

Agile is Dead

lol

GOTO 2015 • Agile is Dead • Pragmatic Dave Thomas

programing language design and popularity. Save a weekend to watch

opinions from programers about programing language can be ignored, as well from those lang creators. pay attention only to expert on these issue, namely, researchers on language design, popularity, history, notation systems, human cognizance field etc.

programer's opinions on languages is like carpenter's on hammer. lang creator's opinion's like the maker of a hammer brand's. what u want instead, is from researchers, designers, scientists, on human anatomy, accident statistics, material science, physics, mech engineering.