CarlRJ
These days it's written language that is pedestrian (especially with WFH because COVID, I write more than I speak these days, except to my cat, who can't read) - it is, as you say, spewing out words, though usually onto a screen. There is vanishingly small cost to each character typed, and erasing/editing is free, and we're all in a terrible hurry to get on to the next thing.
Back then, there were no keyboards, the physical act of writing took time, and the materials had cost. There was more need to think about the words before writing them down. If you were halfway down the page of a neatly worded letter, you'd consider your next words more carefully before writing them down, because changing your mind after scribbling something down was messy and time-consuming - try to erase the ink, or scratch something out, or recopy it all onto a new sheet.
These days, though, I find myself spewing nearly stream of consciousness, then tweaking for a bit before sending, even on a short missive. I keep going back, for instance, to an English teacher who drilled into me to reconsider every it/they/he/she to see if it read better (more clearly) that way, or with repeating the name. Lots of little editing bits like that.
But I do love the sound of a well-turned phrase.
No, YELLLLLLOOoooooowwwwwwww!
I'm bitter too, I build my own local/remote weather station at home (several Raspberry Pi's, an Arduino with a custom shield, and 15k lines of Python), which uses Dark Sky's API as one of its data sources. This means I have a year or so to find a new data source and rewrite a bunch of code (and no source is going to give me exactly the same data from the same sensors, so my 3-4 years of historical data is going to have a definite before/after cutoff in it).
That's only a monopoly in the same sense that McDonalds has a monopoly on Big Macs. It's within their own ecosystem. Customers can decide whether they want to buy into that ecosystem or choose an alternative (like Burger King, or Android).
And it was a timesharing system, so you had to share that one bit with 13 other programmers.
I remember being astonished when my dad told me how they handled punch card accuracy at his office: engineers would write out their programs on (special) paper forms (i.e. a box for each character on each line), and hand the forms off to the computer department, where they'd have two different keypunch operators key in the program. Then they'd feed the two stacks of cards into a special punched-card-comparator machine, which would tell whether the decks matched. If so, it was considered successfully transcribed (and one of the decks could be thrown away).
I also remember reading a story long ago about decks of cards containing scientific programs being sent by rail between cities in two different countries in Europe (IIRC), and they kept having problems with the programs not working. Finally, they sent a courier along with the box of cards at one point. And, as the train crossed the border, the customs inspector boarded the train and checked passports and such, and inspected goods that were being transported, and, as is customary, took a sample from many of the transported goods (as one might take a bit of grain, say)... and, yeah, they took a couple random cards out of the box. Problem identified, if not immediately solved.
And getting specifically the local news notifications makes sure the stuff I'm getting is actually applicable to where I am. If you're in a large enough market so that one or more local TV stations have their own local news apps, the push notifications can be useful even if you never look at the app otherwise (as long as the app can be tuned so it doesn't spend all day sending you random less important stuff - recipes and sports scores and human interest stuff - if so try a different station's app).
I've long listened to either classical or chillout / downtempo lounge in the office - mostly Soma.fm or di.fm - because I've found I want music, but don't want words - if there's lyrics, they distract from the programming project at hand.
I do have a small AM/FM radio in good working order, to prepare for the remote chance that the tubes break and the internet stops coming out of the tubes.
Per Wikipedia, "The Internet (portmanteau of interconnected network) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide."
The network of UUCP-connected machines (also called UUCPNET) did not use TCP/IP and had no inbuilt notion of how to get packets from one place to another. One had to specifically list a set of instructions, a path, from source to destination hosts. UUCPNET was entirely store-and-forward, and sent entire messages, not packets. And it was in wide use throughout the 80's before the Internet became a thing (which happened once researchers started interconnecting networks that used TCP/IP).
To say that UUCPNET was the Internet just without the web, is like saying that radio _is_ TV, just without the pictures.
Though I always liked the line, “Vi is user-friendly - it’s just picky about who its friends are”.
(BTW, “ZZ” is usually the right answer to quitting/exiting - still funny to see, decades on, people teaching “:wq<return>”.)
As to the “Air” name... they got to where they had a solid low-priced offering and a “Pro” line with huge prices. And a big hole in the middle. But “iPad Medium” wasn’t appealing, so they resurrected the “Air” name. (FWIW, writing this on an iPad Air 3, and I love it - the only real loss for me, from the Pro, was the “ProMotion” variable rate 120Hz display, and I could live without that, for $$$ less.)
I’m perfectly fine with a page that says, “here’s a code sample - notice that it looks similar to C, but here’s a list of reasons / an explanation of why/how it’s actually quite different from C.”
One of my favorite programming books of all time is K&R, from back before ANSI, even. It said, “here’s a simple problem to solve, and here’s how you solve it in our language.” Repeatedly. Explaining how the features helped to solve the problem at hand. It was revelatory. And it assumed its audience to be knowledgeable programmers. It didn’t spend the first chapter just describing all the features or how great the language is without showing any code.
That's because vi is a better text editor (as the old saw goes, emacs is a nice OS, but it lacks a decent text editor.)
Agreed. The bit about "oh, well, it fixes mistakes if you rearrange items" falls in the astonishing (in a bad way) camp far too often. When you really meant to number the lines, "2, 4, 6, 8" and it "helpfully" changes this to "1, 2, 3, 4". Arguably it's bad also in a list that has been maintained over time and has out-of-sequence numbers, where the users are counting on the processor to renumber - now, if someone says to change item 37, is that the one numbered 37 in the rendered output, or in the source? Better to use a tool of some sort to physically renumber that section of the source document.
A better alternative for auto-renumbering would be to only have it kick in when the entire list all starts with "1. " and there's more than one line in the list (so "...meet me at<next line>1. Then we'll..." doesn't end up with a line being dragged into being a numbered list). Then, the repeated use of "1. " at the start of the line becomes a much more obvious indication that you want to numbered list.