In Soviet Russa, functions program you!

https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

You don't have to know git: if you found something of interest which is not already in this repo, please open an issue with your links propositions. If you know git, please fork the repo and send pull requests.

That's right, but look carefully and you'll find books on languages which haven't changed much like AWK, C, and Lisp. For Python, Perl, and Javascript you really want more recent materials.

Good, we have enough shitty programmers already.

The game is played right on the results page. Too lazy to actually click a link?

I hope you will make a blog post about how proud you are to use Pascal and moving to a fancy new language would be counterproductive. Then make a submission about it here. :)

I think most of the programming languages ever made are "actively used" by some definition. From my perspective Lisp recently had a resurgence. I don't know what kind of answer will satisfy you, but here are some links:

• https://github.com/trending/common-lisp
• https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_programming_language_popularity

I couldn't agree more. I don't doubt they could do it, but changing languages not as simple as globally replacing printf(specifier, string) with puts string.format(specifier).

I may find it less intimidating/confusing/difficult now. After all, it can't hurt to try

That's the spirit :)

Don't worry about the Voats.

Thanks. I do try to make my comments helpful, or at least humorous. Sometimes I fail.

There are some truths about programming which are inescapable. If you don't fully grasp them, your potential as a programmer will be limited by them.

With that, I'll offer you a sincere apology for my failure to recognize my own limitations as a teacher. There's no need for you to think any less of yourself, especially not because of anything I've written in this thread.

So you never learned to perform basic arithmetic on paper? Did they stop teaching that in school?

I didn't really mean to criticize. I'm just exceptionally grumpy today.

Just being relieved of order of operations is enough reason to respect the parens. OoO wouldn't be so bad, except it's different in every damn language.

The thought of representing assembly language programs as s-expressions makes me wish for an asteroid strike.

• Rotoscoped Turntable Lemons
• Retrograde Targeted Lemurs
• Replaceable Three Letters

Joke about brackets all you like. It's the least annoying part of Lisp.

You haven't lived until you've constructed a null modem cable and connected two terminal devices with it. I still have mine in a shoebox downstairs, though I'd have to write a driver to make it work again. (Fuck, let's hope I never have the need.)

confusingly, DB-25 came to be used for printer parallel ports (which originally had a very different connector)

Centronics

This is a danger with any program which parses unsafe data. A dumb tool like od or hexdump is safer to use. Emacs has hexl-mode for binary files.

Woz wasn't the only one with such expertise.

• https://jbretro.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/passportby4am-jbhworkflow/

I have the EDD card and software for my Apple IIs.

Children are taught recursive algorithms in grade school. It isn't hard to understand.

It's impossible. Ladder-like shapes may be described mathematically, but "drawing" is a side effect. (I'm only half joking.)

That's social engineering.

Commodore BASIC 2.0 is a stripped down dialect of Microsoft BASIC. Much of it is quite similar to BASICA and GWBASIC. The C128 actually has a more powerful BASIC available in native mode. Programs may be developed interactively, in a manner similar to the REPL of modern interpreters.

It is a line numbered dialect, so entering a line number by itself without any code erases any existing line of that number. If you want a blank line for pretty formatting, you'll need to use a REM command or bare : (colon character) to store the line into memory.

There is no virtual memory, so your program text can't grow beyond the internal RAM of the computer. There is also a limit on variables because storage is allocated in static, linear blocks for each variable.

Variable names are limited to two characters. Don't worry about running out of names because you're much more likely to run out of RAM first. (You may actually use longer names, but only the first two characters are significant.)

Variables are typeful and postfix sigils distinguish types. Strings are distinguished by $ (dollar sign), integers by % (percent sign), and floats by no sigil.

10 LET A$ = "FOO" : REM A$ IS A STRING
20 LET A% = 3 : REM A% IS AN INTEGER
30 LET A = 3.141 : REM A IS A FLOAT
40 LET NUMBER = 42 : REM STORES 40.0 INTO THE VARIABLE NU

There are user defined functions, but you have to write them in 6502 assembly language. There are specific rules for argument passing, but I can't remember them. Most peeps just store everything global variables and used subroutines to modularize the code.

Forget doing functional or OO: you're stuck with imperative.

Way to go champ. Now I feel bad for not indicating my sarcasm. At least I can sleep knowing you're unscathed.

Enjoy your downvoats. How dare you share an opinion here?

You can forget analyzing American political rhetoric with the same rigor you'd apply to code. Trying to follow the logic of the average water cooler conversation will turn your brain inside out and make you wish for death to end the despair. The officially recognized debates? Forget it, there's nothing there to analyze.

This is one of those things that has always seemed obvious to me.

Doesn't it suck to be the smartest person in a group? Always feeling as though your own potential is limited by the incompetence of the scrubs you're forced to work with. Knowing that everything you do will be unappreciated by those who can never hope to attain your levels of personal excellence.

I still do that with code I wrote only a few months ago.

http://www.programmingforbeginnersbook.com/blog/what_should_i_make_beginner_programming_project_ideas/

Some folks are better suited to other pursuits. Anyone can appreciate music, but not everyone wants to compose music.

(+ 2016 (- 2016 1936))
2096

Okay. Have fun with that, fellas. It does look pretty neat.

We'll all be dead before anything practical can be done with this.

Learning to code seems pretty easy to me. Most of the students in my college learned the basics of C in a few weeks, and were writing Java programs not long after. There were people who legitimately struggled and one student who failed repeatedly. Tried to help that guy for weeks, but he just couldn't even memorize a simple hello.c for some reason. Strangely enough, he was great with circuits and math.

If your definition of "portable" only applies to systems you write your scripts for, then you can think whatever you like. If you want to share your scripts with people who aren't using the exact same build of the exact same version of the exact same shell, then you might want to consider restricting your scripts to only use POSIX features. Otherwise, simply state explicitly which shell your script depends on. Something I've done in the past is this:

#!/bin/SHELL
#
# Developed for SHELL version n.nn on DISTRO nn.nn.
# May not work with other shells on other systems.

It is an error if the recipient attempts to run the script on any system which doesn't have /bin/SHELL, which is fine because that would mean their system is not the same as yours. If they have SHELL at a different location they can manually edit the shebang. After that, it is up to them to ensure that their system meets your script's requirements. Make sure to clearly detail exactly what all these requirements are.

The POSIX shell is a description of a portable Bourne-like shell. I'm not aware of any two conforming implementations which are fully compatible with each other.

Which shell is portable?

Dunno, I mostly listened while reading something unrelated.

No, fuck that. Too many of the trolls at Hacker News are more intelligent than I am. Don Quixote I am not.

I feel generally positive about this. As long as you find it useful I say keep going with it. Will you continue communicating about it here?

Folk wisdom tends to be both rude and opaque.

Agreed. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Though I'm loath to ask, what does this have to do with women? Is it just something nonsensical which is meant to sound funny?

Pretty sure that's what github is for.

What language? Where's the code?

I frequently code in Emacs Lisp, but rarely share my programs because the community is bipolar:

• "I don't really know Lisp and parentheses scare me."
• "I really know Lisp and you should kill yourself before you pollute the environment with any more of this garbage."

#!/usr/bin/awk
{
    split("", c);
    for(i=1; i<=length($0); ++i)
        c[substr($0, i, 1)]++
    for(i=1; i<=length($0); ++i)
        if(c[substr($0, i, 1)]==1) {
           print substr($0, i, 1)
           break
        }
}

But, I find Ruby to be redundant. Why program in Ruby when I have a perfectly good Python right here?

That's a perfectly reasonable opinion to hold. I may not agree, but I can respect it.

But Ruby deserves more hate than it gets.

That's just unnecessary. I can't agree or respect that.

Thanks for sharing your opinions. Now please stop.

If you want something easy to learn while also practical for IRL use, Python and Ruby are great choices. If you want to work as a professional programmer, Javascript is never fucking going away.

Just out of curiosity, why the hate for Ruby?

obvious coding talents

Will hasn't demonstrated noteworthy coding talents that I can recall. He strikes me as someone who has studied and practiced long hours to gain the knowledge he has.

If anything, his talent may be in making programming appealing to newbies. That's obviously not what he's doing here.

The comment about "navigating a file that is thousands of lines of code is a nicer problem than navigating lots of small files" seems insane.

It sounds like the opinion of one who uses a text editor instead of an IDE. Having written OO in text editors, I'm convinced that slow and heavy IDEs won't be displaced any time soon.

clickbait

I can see how one might think that, but Will has been building his case against OO for years. The title might be sensational, but it very much reflects his views.

The whole sub-function to minimise the footprint of the library is a superficial point which can be solved using private functions. Public functions are the only thing someone needs to be aware of. Making a private function into a sub-function doesn't solve anything. It just moves code around. On a related note, D language has the sub-function use case he is looking for in a language.

If anything, I feel like his choice to use "subfunctions" just validates the OO model. "Here's a function that isn't generally useful to the program as a whole, but is required to perform these operations on this data." Sounds like a private method to me.

FWIW I don't think Will is altogether wrong in his conclusions. It seems to me that the way we do OO right now is not as useful as it could be. Every OO program I've ever written has been at least 5 times larger than its procedural equivalent, and the source code bloat didn't buy me much in the way of maintainability. But that's just me.

Personally I'm surprised to learn that a working NES emulator can fit in under 10k lines of OO code.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/337338.The_UNIX_Programming_Environment

• emacs -nw
• vi
• ed is the standard editor

If your code becomes harder to read then it is a big fat clue that you have designed the classes wrongly.

That's more or less Diederich's conclusion to the talk. He doesn't advocate abandoning OO design.

original essay

Install it into a VM and let us know what you think.

What kinds of things are lacking?

When last I used it, SeaMonkey was a Firefox compatible browser without all the stupidity. If the Firefox devs continue removing useful features and replacing them with ad space I can easily see myself checking back in with SeaMonkey. Other ideas:

• Pale Moon
• GNU IceCat
• Konqueror
• Midori
• Vivaldi

With Microsoft working on retiring pre-10 versions of Windows, I can imagine a lot of ppl want to run their ancient apps instead of upgrading. My only possible reason for interest in ReactOS is running Windows games, but would it be better for that than Wine?

"Fake"? Where's the cause for inflammatory words? This project has a history which can be examined.

| ReactOS Project development started in 1996 as new clone of Windows 95.

For something to be "fake" it should claim to be something it is not: inauthentic in some way at least. By all accounts, this project is exactly what it claims to be.