amoroso

amoroso, 5 months ago to Lisp

"Common Lisp is not a beautiful crystal of programming language design. It's a scruffy workshop with a big pegboard wall of tools, a thin layer of sawdust on the floor, a filing cabinet in the office with a couple of drawers that open perpendicular to the rest, [...]"

"This historical baggage is a price paid to ensure Common Lisp had a future."

https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/

#CommonLisp #lisp

amoroso, 9 days ago to Lisp

This is the year of the Lisp Machine desktop.

Here's an online Medley Interlisp session on my Chromebox. Your turn: show off your Lisp Machine environment.

#interlisp #lisp #LispMachine

amoroso, 9 months ago to Lisp

In this post Michał Herda explained what Lisp programmers intuitively know.

The parentheses don't bother Lisp programmers as they read code by its indentation and rely on Lisp-aware tools such as editors and IDEs, which match parentheses and properly indent code.

https://nl.movim.eu/?blog/phoe%40movim.eu/cd3577f6-fb1d-45f5-b881-7b9a68ee822e

#lisp

amoroso, 5 months ago to retrocomputing

Those who dismiss or deride BASIC don't go beyond the language. Guillaume Chereau points out there's more to BASIC as on early microcomputers it provided a full development environment too, almost an IDE.

I'd say BASIC also supported a REPL-based, exploratory programming style similar to Lisp's.

https://gcher.com/posts/2023-12-24-basic/

#basic #retrocomputing

amoroso, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

A short history of the ASUS Eee PC and netbooks.

I never got one because, although cool, the limited use I'd have done wouldn't justify even the affordable price as I had no mobility or form factor needs.

https://www.spacebar.news/the-asus-eee-pc-and-the-netbook-revolution/

#retrocomputing #netbook #laptop

amoroso, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to space

These unofficial Mastodon accounts of space agencies are bots that merely share news items the agencies publish elsewhere, yet the accounts have quite a lot of followers:

• NASA: @nasa 71K followers
• ESA: @esa 1.4K followers

There's an unfulfilled demand for public institutions to communicate on open and independent platforms.

#nasa #esa #space #mastodon #fediverse

amoroso, 5 months ago to usenet

The sad state of my quest for a Usenet NNTP GUI client for Linux.

Pan is awesome but the binaries of my Debian Bullseye based distro, Crostini, are ancient and buggy. The Pan project distributes no .deb or other packages. Building from source requires recent versions of tools not in Bullseye.

Very few other GUI options available. Even fewer with .deb or other binaries.

#usenet #nntp #linux

amoroso, 4 months ago to Lisp

In 1984, 40 years ago, Digital Press published the book "Common LISP: Reference Manual" by Guy L. Steele Jr. and others, more widely known as the first edition of "Common Lisp: The Language" or CLtL1. It was an early major milestone of a Lisp standardization process completed a decade later.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/_Books/_Digital_Press/Steele_Common_Lisp_Reference_Manual_1984.pdf

#CommonLisp #lisp #retrocomputing

amoroso, 11 months ago to retrocomputing

In some contemporary retrocomputing works I see 1970s and 1980s computers such as PDPs and VAXen increasingly referred to as "mainframes".

Weren't they supposed to be minis and superminis? Weren't mainframes different machines, such as the IBM System/360?

#retrocomputing

amoroso, 5 months ago to Lisp

Do you have any questions on the Medley Interlisp language, environment, tools, history, or project? Ask and I'll try to answer here.

I look forward to your questions as they'll provide valuable feedback on the system and help flesh out the FAQs on the project site.

https://interlisp.org

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing

amoroso, 8 months ago to Lisp

I'm looking for a Lisp resource I run across but can't find anymore.

It's a Common Lisp reference similar to the HyperSpec or possibly based on its text, but with a clean web design and modern HTML formatting. The name of the resource rhymes with "spec" or "hyperspec".

Does it ring a bell? Can you help?

#CommonLisp #lisp

amoroso, 5 months ago to retrocomputing

Julio Merino dived back into some decades old text mode editors and IDEs, particularly Borland's which were the pinnacle of this technology.

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and

#ide #TurboPascal #retrocomputing

amoroso, 1 year ago to programming

To improve as a programmer, many advise to read lots of code but few actually do.

In this old but still relevant essay Peter Seibel discussed why and explained what he does instead, summarizing his approach this way:

"Code is not literature and we are not readers. Rather, interesting pieces of code are specimens and we are naturalists."

https://gigamonkeys.com/code-reading

#CodeReading #programming

amoroso, 1 year ago to random

When I update Telegram's web client webk.telegram.org the app's tab goes blank. Now I get the same when updating the main client web.telegram.org. What gives?

This has been occurring on chromeOS for the past several months. The issue was reported long ago but nothing happened:

https://bugs.telegram.org/c/24017

#telegram

amoroso, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to fediverse

Do you donate to the Mastodon project and/or your instance?

One time or recurring payments both qualify as donations.

#mastodon #fediverse

amoroso, 6 months ago to amiga

I didn't know that Borland announced Turbo Pascal for the Amiga but never released it:

https://bytecellar.com/2023/12/04/thinking-back-on-turbo-pascal-as-it-turns-40/

#TurboPascal #amiga #retrocomputing

amoroso, 1 year ago to random

You know the international tech press is US-centric when...

Google releases Bard in 180 countries but the whole of Europe is missing. And no reporter notices or cares enough to probe further.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35900615

#google

amoroso, 5 months ago to usenet

From The rise and fall of Usenet:

"In many ways, Usenet is a warning about how social networks can go bad. All the same, problems we see today on social networks appeared first on Usenet."

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-usenet-how-the-original-social-media-platform-came-to-be/

#usenet #retrocomputing

amoroso, 9 months ago to usenet

I'm happy there's renewed activity around Usenet, such as a new management committee and group maintenance to remove obsolete groups and create new ones.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/30/usenet_revival

#usenet

amoroso, 10 months ago to linux

A good history of Linux Mandrake (later Mandriva), the first easy-to-use, user-focused Linux distro. It's very interesting as I never got a chance to try it.

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-linux-mandrake

#linux #retrocomputing

amoroso, 8 months ago to random

LinkedIn is the Instagram of work, a glossy alternate reality where everyone is happy and fulfilled in their professional life.

amoroso, 5 months ago to retrocomputing

As many others, I always wondered why Steve Jobs went with the 68K for NeXT workstations instead of the 386.

The possible reasons discussed here are interesting. The product positioning and business ones make sense as much as the technical reasons.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/28131/why-did-steve-jobs-choose-the-motorola-6803025-mhz-for-the-first-next-computer

#NeXTCube #NeXTComputer #retrocomputing

amoroso, 6 months ago to retrocomputing

My visit to the Ctrl+Alt Museum retrocomputing museum in Pavia, Italy, blew my mind. Why? The hundreds of photos I took speak for themselves, go see them now.

Opened a year and a half ago, the museum is a new and little known geeky gem packed with all sorts of vintage computing hardware and stuff. It's run by a non profit group of passionate collectors, enthusiasts, and makers who also do outreach and education activities.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/A6HF2Tv1Q4asX4Ks5

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #museum

amoroso, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

Retro Programming is a delightful but sadly abandoned blog about programming retro systems, particularly the Spectrum and Z80 devices.

However, the archive is full of great posts on Z80 Assembly, Forth, BASIC, and more. Lots of interesting technical details and project ideas.

http://www.retroprogramming.com

#retrocomputing #assembly #forth

amoroso, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to VintageOSes

Buried deep in an old repo I discovered a CP/M subsystem of Medley Interlisp which even runs WordStar and Turbo Pascal.

#cpm #interlisp #retrocomputing #AprilFools #AprilFool