Unless I missed something, I don't think being easy for novices to use was one of Larry's design goals for Perl. Nevertheless, I found Perl pretty easy to learn, and it's the only language I ever "stuck with" long enough to build complicated programs.
I thought it was a bit odd that he wrote 7 paragraphs about music equipment and software, but didn't mention which GNU/Linux distribution(s) he uses on his "junky" laptops.
I'm not a programmer, but I suspect the detail on the music gear might be because the sound you get depends on the instruments and effects chain.
The code you get out of your coding session, or the LaTeX source for your book, does not really depend on which method you chose to install and update GNU/Linux.
I suspect you're right - I spend a lot more time programming than playing music but have a stronger emotional attachment to my music gear than my coding environment.
Musicians call it GAS, Gear Acquisition Syndrome, e.g. I've got major GAS for an Ampeg amp.
Shiiiit, that's because the music gear is both more fun, has more style, and will actually exist and work well in 20 years. The computers will be gone in like 3 years, so why bother talking about them?
But, to answer your question, I use nearly every OS there is: Linux (Arch, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora), NetBSD, FreeBSD, OSX, and Windows. I have to use all of these to test different things on various projects. As I get more into writing books though this narrows down to Ubuntu, OSX, and ArchLinux.
I understand the gearhead mentality (I was raised by one), and I actually enjoyed reading about the music equipment. I just didn't expect it because when I hear "Zed Shaw" I think "programmer", not "musician", even though I realize that few people, even programmers, are one-dimensional. I guess it's just one of my many mental biases. Thanks for putting my question to rest.
Don't know why I am answering because my response is most likely inaccurate, but IIRC (specifically from following him on Twitter) he used to use Arch linux for a while. I also remember him complaining about it and IIRC he made a switch. I am sure once he sees the post he will correct me and or answer you.
Nope, you can install awesome on ubuntu and then switch to using it. Best setup is to make a .xsession file and fire up the various gnome services you need. Then have GDM boot up a "User Defined" session (or whatever it's called, I forget).
I'm not sure I understand this story. Is it basically "check out the design of this website" or am I missing something? I thought, and the site confirms it, that Nethack has been around for quite awhile, so that's certainly not news. Roughly half the comments so far are about how good/bad the game was, and the other half are about this website, so I'm not sure what is supposed to be piquing my intellectual curiosity. I also don't mean to put down the site or the game. I'm just not sure what I'm looking for here.
Personally, I dislike websites that try to grab my keys. I use pentadactyl/vrome, so if the website just lists everything I need to do there as a normal hyperlink, I need only hit f+number and I'm good to go. That isn't to say that it isn't innovative or cool. It's just not up my alley. I like to let local applications manage the keyboard.
I agree that websites should not be able to override your keys. I'm often annoyed when I press '/' in firefox, expecting quicksearch to come up, and instead the website hijacks it for their own search.
However, I don't think that this should be solved at a website level. Websites shouldn't know or care what keys do in your browser; they should simply provide reasonable shortcut keys. Browsers should make it so that their shortcut keys cannot be overridden without your explicit permission.
This is mostly the fault of insufficient Chrome addon API afaik. In Firefox/Pentadactyl the addon automatically hijacks all the keypresses and only by pressing CTRL-Z can you fall back into direct mode and feed keypress events to Javascript.
I actually wanted to know what he was really doing, since the article just says he wanted to talk to Cook about the next product. Had I known a simple question was grounds for reproof here I wouldn't have asked.
I found some of Khan's orgo videos helpful review material. In fact, the doctorate-level professor I had didn't do a much better job (if at all better) of explaining the material the first time around.
I find it somewhat strange that video games are OK (it's on a screen but interactive) and I guess live theater is OK (it's passive but not on a screen), but the combination of passively watching something on a screen is not OK.
Video games allow the user to interact with the media and cause reactions to input. It allows us to explore causality at a very personal level, even though the systems and entities invovled are entirely virtual.
Live theater allows the user to control what to focus on during each scene. If there is a conversation, we can choose who the "camera" is pointing at. We are also looking at real human beings interacting with each other. The experience is mildly interactive.
Passive screen-based media gives us neither set of choices.
How is looking at an image of live human beings "worse" than looking at live human beings (which is ultimately an image too)?
If the child is given a remote control, does that count as interactivity since he can choose what to look at while exploring causality?
By the way, I'm not arguing that TV is good for kids. I'm just trying to analyze the argument in favor of preventing infants from watching passive screen media.
You can't compare seeing human beings interacting in a "true 3D", real-life setting to the same thing happening on a screen. You don't get depth perception, and there are artifacts of recording in video and audio (even in modern HD shows) that make a real-life scene distinctly different. I don't know scientifically how that's important, I just know there's a difference. You know there's a difference if you ever see someone on TV and then see them in real life for the first time.
A remote doesn't explore causality inside the media, it's only exploring "when I press a certain button it will switch to a different show which is not of my choosing and which I can't predict". They might correllate pressing the same numbers with the same show at the same time of the day. The "camera angle" interactivity in live theater doesn't get into causality at all, just different ways you can look at or listen to a scene, but in videogames causality is rarely so random.
Think of it at a very basic, I-don't-know-what-TV-or-videogames-are level: I press the channel up button on the remote, the image suddenly changes to something entirely different. If I do this a few hours later, the former image and the latter image are entirely different from before. Let's even assume I'm watching Netflix and I've figured out how to navigate menus: the menu is interactive, but the media I'm watching doesn't give me any control over what's happening inside the media. In a videogame, if I press a button a character will move, a gun will shoot, a menu will open. If I do the same thing a few hours from now, the same thing will happen. A different thing might happen in a predictable context: if my dude is in front of a wall he might climb the wall rather than jump when I press A, it's generally bad design to allow otherwise. The link between cause and effect is much more clear, and my role as an agent of cause is much more clear as well.
Putting the article's content aside, how many "beginner's guides" to Vim do we really need? It seems like every other week I find a new author writing about basic vim commands. Now, considering the article's content-- I'm not sure it contained anything that couldn't be learned from `vimtutor`, but it's been quite a while since I've run it.
Pretty much nothing from this article is in vimtutor, as I learned using that and don't recognize any of these commands. It teaches cw, dw, things like that, but it doesn't go into depth like this article.
You're right. I mistook vimtutor for the first chapter of a Vim book I have, although I did make a point to indicate that I wasn't 100% sure in the OP.
I've been using vi for 15+ years and full-time for development for about a year. There were at least 3 of these that I wasn't aware of which I will now commit to memory.
Certainly a beginner could learn this stuff right away, but I wouldn't consider it inherently beginner-oriented. Personally I don't think one canonical tutorial or reference is as effective as a large number of articles focused on things that different individuals find useful. Vim is just too big to absorb through one gargantuan tutorial.
My guess is that it's a combination of a) a lot of people are learning Vim right now and b) a lot of these people have blogs.
Coming to Vim from some other editor is an awesome experience for them and they want to share.
I know: I've been using Vim daily since one year now (coming from TextMate) and I've posted 20+ random tricks as I learned them. I'm currently drafting my "one year with Vim" post.
So if I rewrite an existing program from scratch and it takes 10x longer than just using the existing one, but one person uses the program, it's still worth the time?
I think that one person could have found the information from an existing source, such as _:help text-objects_. That isn't to say that the article is useless; it's just redundant.
The post covers material outside of Vim's help system (e.g. some Vim scripts that create new text objects), and provides a different presentation that might be helpful to someone learning the concept. I think that's valuable.
