Lmst

@screwlisp

FYI, I have finally published the actual source of my 2014 essay "Whither Original Thought" to my web site. It links to the audio from your radio show a month ago when I had read it aloud for the first time.

https://nhplace.com/kent/Writing/Whither-Original-Thought.html

#Philosophy #Programming #OriginalThought #literacy #education #thought #legitimacy #LispyGopher #invention #originality

@screwtape

This message is part of some prep you and I were doing for an upcoming show, but it also contains information that might have information that is of historical interest, so I'm going to send it in publicly viewable mode, even though it somewhat joins a private conversation already in progress and the context may not be entirely clear.

(I guess people can ask questions if something in here makes no sense out of context, or they can tune in when we talk on your show on what's tentatively slated to be May 13 when we talk about it on-air. Or they can submit questions to you/us privately in advance of that.)

This message will be several sections long.

1/n

#LispyGopher

@screwtape

At the start of your radio show this week, you mentioned the terms haiku/senryū/tanka. I had some comments on that.

I'm not some sort of expert on what these are. I just use the form and figure, in the way that an online poetry class, How Writers Write Poetry, that I took at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program offered, that each poem creates the terms on which it is to be judged. So it really doesn't matter a lot to me whether I'm precisely correct, so much as that I have my own sense of the form I want to say the things i want.

But I also try to at least be vaguely correct. So what follows here is my understanding but is not offered as an authoritative piece. People should feel free to offer corrections or critiques if they like, as long as they realize that I'm not in the first place saying I'm the best place to read about these things. There are some very good online descriptions that differ in subtle ways and I don't even care that they disagree because to me, that's not the point of poetry.

A haiku is a 5-7-5 syllable poem based on nature and seasons. There are a few other subtleties, and some controversy as to whether all project properly into English.

In particular, there is a thing called a kireji that has grammatical form in Japanese or Kanji, I presume representing it (and incidentally shared by Chinese). A kireji is described in Wikipedia as "is a word or phrase that creates a pause or break in the flow of a haiku". I'm unclear about whether this is a fixed set. But I know someone who thinks of it as a semicolon, connecting two full sentences in tight form. I myself just assume that, sans kireji, I should make line (the second 5 in 5-7-5) be a change of direction of some kind, including an irony, a contradiction, a commentary, or some other surprise element. The haiku form is a very short space in which to write anything, so it's important to me not to waste words on that, and merely to nice that line 3 is special

A senryu is the same structure but less about nature and more about things like the 'human foibles' you mentioned.

I have a special problem with knowing whether some of my poetry counts as proper haiku because supposedly it's about the seasons and should include a kigo (season word, which might include things like cherry blossoms associated with the season, not necessarily precisely the season). But climate change disturbs the structure and so the set of elements belonging in the set, not to mention it also "goes meta" and speaks of the mechanical process of how, why, or whether seasons are shifted, not just in-frame views of a season. ChatGPT was supportive of my staking a claim in this space, as it says others have done, but I'm never quit sure when to trust its judgment. I push forward mostly because I'm strong-willed. But I usually label with both terms to acknowledge potential controversy or just difficulty with lookup.

A tanka is a 5-7-5-7-7 poem of similar kind, and I ASSUME it traditionally is a haiku in content but mostly I write senryu so I only presume/force it to be more a modifier than a noun in order to have both tanka-haiku and tanka-senryu, though if you look it up they just say it's a noun.

Tankas are usually two tightly related yet grammatically independent thoughts, even I've read some places, written by different people for the 5-7-5 and the 7-7, where the 7-7 builds a different thought around the core thought of the 5-7-5 part, which I understand to be free-standing. One place I read suggested the 7-7 part was at least sometimes a response that came back from someone writing a haiku as correspondence.

I'm not going to cite extra references here because I'd have to look them up. Better you should do it not only because I am admittedly lazy, but also because in researching it (if you care, and you might legitimately not), you'll probably find some lovely essays by others on how to think about these art forms.

#LispyGopher

Editor market share via Stackoverflow:
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/
VS Code 73.6%
…
Vim 21.6%
Neovim 12.5%
…
Nano 9.2% (dorks!)
Emacs 4.2%
Spacemacs 0.4%

ed, the standard text editor, is not reported, but we all know it should be #1.

#editor #emacs #vim #nano #ed #lispygopher

Happy new year to all, but special good wishes to @screwtape for conjuring and maintaining this delightfully odd #LispyGopher social group.

cc @fstateaudio @hairylarry @nosrednayduj @me @rat @pkw @prahou @northernlights @SDF @mdhughes @Contrapunctus

Updated my little McCLIM thing, now it has movement on a grid. Probably more adventurey than roguelike, but I needed some basic tech for moving so chars were easiest. Or maybe I'll figure out bitmaps next time.

https://gitlab.com/mdhughes/mcclim-console/

But it's still generally not updating on commands, only if I jiggle the window a little. I don't get it! Am I gonna have to use AppleScript to move the window +0,+0 every second?

#lisp #clim #mcclim #LispyGopher
@screwtape @jackdaniel

green grid of squares, labelled 24,24 R, down to 40,40 S, 32,32 @ in center
gray row of commands and You see X entries
gray Command: prompt

@heckj Yeah, we have a #LispyGopher meetup every week, and been re-exploring it.

@screwtape Thanks to you and @sacha for doing your show. I would have commented, but I am not sure how. Do you respond to this post or do you write a message to hashtag #LispyGopher ?

Finally got my new stickers.

Besides the middle OpenBSD one (from the main store), got the rest from @prahou 's redbubble.

#openbsd #unix_surrealism #lispygopher

@screwtape

This will be very rambly and informal and free-format and approximate, but someone might like it...

TECO has been around a long time. It was certainly around when I arrived on the MIT scene 1977-ish. But probably a long time before.

You asked what people used as a screen editor and I have to laugh. TECO was not really a screen editor, but was the implementation substrate for original Emacs. I'll tell the story I know.

TECO had commands that were single character (mostly, though some composed) and you did a set of commands and then could ask to see what you did. Usually, because it also worked on a paper terminal (which recorded everything you typed onto reams of paper), you saw maybe one line of context and then made some change. Some people did really long lives with entire defuns on one line. But it kind of didn't matter. c was the command to move foward. d to delete a character. 3c-4d would go forward 3 characters and delete 4 characters backward. You ended your command with Esc Esc (which echoed as $$) so 3c-4d$$ would show you the edited line and then you'd do more. A single Esc was a command separator or terminator, but two caused it to go.

You could put "macros" (really just strings of commands) in a thing called a q-register (really just a variable, except primitive Teco had no variables). The q-registers were so-called because they were named q0, q1, etc. and also qA, qB, ... qZ. You could put something in them with u. 5uA puts 5 into qA. Some commands were modifiable with @ or : (like in format strings in CL). So while ifoo$ would insert foo into the buffer at the current point, :i05c-4d$ would not insert anything in the buffer but would instead insert '5c-4d' into q0. So once you have strings in q registers you could execute them with m, as in m0 which would execute my sample string from above.

At some point, they changed it on glass (non-paper) screens to show you the buffer as edited, but still it was not doing the WYSIWYG thing. You saw part of a buffer with /\ as a cursor. So /\foo if the cursor was before foo. And Steele suggested that if there was a q-register assigned to each key, you could have it run that macro on hitting that key, which was the origin of emacs ^R (control-R) mode, ^R being the command that would get you into it. R for "real-time" mode. Stallman implemented it. I don't know who thought up the naming, probably Stallman.

The key bindings were on specially named new q-registers that had dots in their names. I think q^RA, q^RB, etc. where ^R was a control-R character. For control-A, q^R.A, for meta-A, q^R..A, etc. and for c-m-A q^R...A, so that allowed binding all the keys.

And at that point you had a realtime mode that was emacs-like. People could have init files that loaded up any of the q-registers with their own bindings, and there were library formats created so people could pre-load complicated definitions.

There was a lot of competition for whose library bindings would win out. Emacs was not the only early offering. Whole other packagings were available from various people. But eventually there was a mostly-consensus on a lot of it, and the rest became libraries on that.

TECO, especially the MIT variant, looks a bit like line noise since nearly every character was a command. But fortunately in libraries the style was to include code on the first half of the line and use the last half of the line as a comment explaining it. Here's a pointer to a library I wrote in TECO that tried to emulate some of the Lisp Machine's mail reader Zmail. If you want to see how the language worked by just kind of letting it roll past you.

https://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/mit_emacs_170_teco_1220/01/emacs/zbabyl.emacs.html

#LispyGopher #TECO #history

@screwtape

Listening on "tape" to the #LispyGopher show I missed earlier tonight...

You mentioned the editorship of the ANSI CL document but seemed uncertain on who my predecessor was. There's a bit of favoritism to the person that finished it, but she put in years of work and doesn't get mentioned enough, so I'll take the chance to mention her work again. She did a LOT of important setup work, dividing the document into the approximate shape that it ended up, before I took it over. She wasn't herself a Lisper, as I recall, but she had Gary Brown, Walter van Roggen, and perhaps others at DEC

Kathy Chapman, then of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC, at the time a major player in the computer industry), was my predecessor as the Project Editor of the ANSI CL spec. She began with Steele's CLTL as her base document, as I understand it. (Steele later, after much editing by both her and me, said that there was sufficiently little resemblance that he didn't feel we should see it as a derivative work, but I feel a need to at least mention that he was, in point of historical fact, her predecessor, even if his work was done as part of a different project.)

Section 5.5 of Common Lisp: The Untold Story tells about Kathy, so I won't repeat more of that here.

I'm also especially conscious of the need to mention her because of there's been some recent discussion about overlooking women in awarding nobel prizes, and it related to the order of authors and what was inferred from that.

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-10-08/why-researcher-rosalind-lee-the-wife-of-the-nobel-prize-winner-in-medicine-didnt-receive-the-award-as-well.html

I try as best I can to take time out of people's praise for CLHS to note that while CLHS (the hypertextification part) was mine and certainly a bunch of the editing of the original ANSI CL document in TeX was mine, there was also a lot of editing and interpersonal coordination (with committee members offering opinions) by Kathy during her 2 full-time years as editor, and there was tons of other work supporting us, developing and approving technical proposals, administrative management of various kinds, funding efforts, legal help, etc. such that it really was a committee effort.

But when it comes even to the editing, as the Hardcopy Credits (https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/00_.htm) note:

Kent M. Pitman
1993-present [at time of 1994 publication] at Harlequin
1990-1992 at Symbolics
Kathy Chapman
1987-1989 Digital Equipment Corporation

/via @screwtape 's #lispygopher

Back in the '90s, on USENET there was heavy discussion of multi-server MUD travel. It foundered on a bunch of problems. Technical: Different object systems, even minor variants.

Social: Game balance & culture. My CircleMUD was low-power, "real life" with tech as magic, some were super-high-power goofy fantasy. DikuMUDs (parent of Circle) were VERY high-power, EverQuest is Diku.
#mud #gamedev

@screwtape

Still listening to this week's LispyGopher show. Now you're talking about whether CLIM is "about graphics" or "about present/accept".

Personally, I'd say these operate at different levels of abstraction so aren't in competition with one another.

One of the cool innovations of what was originally the Lisp Machine's "Dynamic Windows" and later became CLIM is this notion that present/accept are a very abstract way of saying that your program has stuff to give or receive without getting too into the weeds on how that will be done.

And yet when you render a specific presentation, it can't just be abstractly, you have to make concrete choices.

Graphics is one way to do it. Graphics offer a nice way to densely pack information in a way most of us have visual hardware to unpack efficiently.

Then again, one of my best friends is blind, and she'd likely dispute the efficiency of graphics as a way to communicate, and that's what's important about the presentation system--that it has rich enough understanding of what it's done that you could ask it, even after-the-fact, to re-present something in a different way that might be better accessible. And yet to do so in a way that doesn't say "different information needed to be presented", but merely "the information that got presented would be more helpful if it could be re-rendered based on different assumptions".

(Of course, it's been decades since I used CLIM. But I assume those kinds of things haven't changed much.)

#CommonLisp #Lisp #LispyGopher #CLIM

@screwtape

I'm listening to this week's #LispyGopher show on "tape". Thanks for the mentions of my work. You were somewhat apologetic about trying to interpret my words, but inevitably words DO get interpreted. No worries.:) What you said was in range, though I'll add some nuance:

You mentioned the issue of how the climate discussion would be affected by having better access to education. It's not that I mind that people look to community leaders who are well-educated. We need such leaders. But it should be the OPTION of any citizen to be personally well-informed so that they are not reduced to only trusting others.

My general feeling on education is that it should be more central and more available. It's odd because we're a much wealthier society than we allow ourselves to see. We allow riches to pile up in just a few people, with mostly ill effect in my opinion. With a few million dollars, one starts to think of starting companies. With billions, one wonders what one can even do, and it's almost inevitable that one tries to meddle with whole countries. What, other than politics, exists at that kind of monetary scale. But is that something we WANT people to be doing?

The rich disdain most others, who they seem to regard as less educated, capable, or worthy. But why is that? Could it be we've invested less in those people? The rich would say those people should invest in themselves, but the hard problem is getting an initial stake.

We loan money, but through banks. Why? Governments could directly loan money. It's not like they don't have access to money. Moreover, they don't have to worry about collection. They're already set up to collect taxes. Putting banks in the middle is pure gift to the banks. It has no function but to allow friend-bankers to extract profit, which makes loans inefficient and reduces whole populations to debt service needlessly, all on a claim that the banks have to protect themselves from financial risk by higher interest rates, something the government would not have to protect itself from. An entirely contrived problem.

Also, we live in a society where we've gone from human labor to manufacturing, but with ever more automation. And normally people have moved to other jobs as this happens. But with AI, which is more able to pivot quickly than people, the AI will be displacing workers everywhere, except those especially well-prepared educationally. It will gobble up the low end. And business is anxious to do that. It hates human labor. The negotiations, the insurance, the benefits, the whole of it. AI is all about cost-cutting (people-cost cutting).

Meanwhile people get themselves into debt for whole lifetimes just learning one thing, only to find it's not a job skill anyone needs any more. Then what? Education needs to be free because we need retraining faster than most can afford.

And anyway we need it politically because the modern world is more and more complicated, so more and more a victim of Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws#The_laws). But we should not, any more than we're forced to, treat the world as full of only magic. We should try to keep up.

It's pointless to have a democracy where everyone gets a vote if the people are voting on information that is not transparently available, whether that information is fair and balanced news reporting or is proper understanding of science or history or art or whatever is affecting them. If you don't understand the question on a ballot, you might as well not have a vote. So education is central there, and to say that only the rich can have an education is to talk about the most severe kind of "poll tax" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_States) you could possibly imagine.

And, finally, I think there are a lot of things that political conservatives would like us to view as taxes on society. Expenditures are not always taxes, or even what I think of as expenses. An investment is not an expense in the sense of money spent that is just gone. Spending money on education isn't like spending money on a solid gold toilet or a spare yacht. It's something meaningful that helps the world. So it transforms value stored in money to value stored in other ways (and without even destroying the money in the process--now there is some "magic" worth learning about).

But what I'm saying in all-too-roundabout a way is that educating people isn't a gift we give privately to a person that only benefits that person. It's a gift we give ourselves. Because to live in a society of educated people is to enable the best work of SO MANY people who now waste away their lives on pointless small jobs just to make ends meet. Imagine how many of them would be writers, inventors, doctors, etc. if only they could afford it.

If everyone in the world were well-educated, how would that improve our chances against the Climate Crisis?

#climate #education #StudentDebt #debt #AI #unemployment #LispyGopher