lojic

pg "master of the straw man"

I sure wish he'd stick to technical stuff. The combination of arrogance and ignorance displayed in that essay is a bit too much. I'd be a lot happier if he'd release another version of Arc than to peddle this drivel :(

Yawn. I'm getting rather sick of Zed - whether it's his toddler tantrum tirades, or this jumbled, rambling brain dump.

"The truth is: Any language that's Turing Complete and supports enough language features can solve any problem."

Really? Wow, thanks Zed.

Now that a comments link exists. It would be nice to have points displayed also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118589

Are there any folks using RSS for Hacker News out there? I'm surprised there isn't more demand for displaying the points in the RSS feed.

Wow, in light of recent Zed events, I think I owe you an apology! That must be one heck of a grapevine.

I like the phrasing:

"The difference between practice and theory is greater in practice than in theory."

Hard to say what would be a good reason for you, but I had used vim for a couple of years and really liked it. I still like its conciseness.

I became interested in emacs because of the good support for Lisp w/ slime, etc. Plus, I thought I'd prefer extending my editor with Lisp vs. vim script - I was right. I hadn't written any vim scripts while using vim, but I've quickly written many little elisp functions and bound them to convenient keys.

The dired (directory editing) feature is great. I like the way it handles buffers & bookmarks better than vim. I actually use the calendar feature.

I like how the functions you right get integrated into the help facility automatically.

The "Learning GNU Emacs" book is great.

The architecture seems better than vim.

I wasn't thrilled with all the "chording", but I'm writing new functions and making the keybindings comfortable for me.

The help facility seems superior to me. Dynamic abbreviations, window/frame control.

I'm sure there's more, but I only switched about 10 days ago :)

I recently switched from vim to emacs. It's so easy to extend with elisp functions, and the buffer handling & directory editing is great. Not to mention ecb, etc. I still like vim, emacs just works better for me presently.

I did have to put in some effort to get nice fonts, but as the article states, if you use emacs 23, you can get it to look beautiful. I wrote a post about how to get it running with nice fonts:

http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs-on...

"Couldn't you write some standalone scripts to run from the commandline to insert new posts into your blog?"

As someone mentioned in the comments on that site, there's no need to write special scripts for this - using script/console does the job nicely with Rails.

  script/console
  post = BlogPost.new("title", "body", ... )
  post.save
  ^d

You're modifying the database vs. in memory objects, but when you're scaling up via multiple app server instances, it's handy to store the info in the db.

Wow, and I thought Ruby was slow!

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?t...

+1 I'm surprised this feature doesn't exist. I don't have many saved items yet, but I would think it could clutter up rather quickly.

Would you mind elaborating on the persistence a little? What is the granularity of persistence? For example, does each submission get written to its own file with associated comments? Do you utilize a memory mapped file? Inquiring minds want to know :)

Yeah baby! I missed one true/false Ruby idiosyncracy, and that did the trick :)

Oh yeah, Ruby has a slightly different interpretation of true/false, so I changed while(z) to while (z != 0) - likewise with if. No help though :(

Looks pretty close to Ruby: 1) remove semi-colons 2) replace a = b - - with a = b followed by b -= 1 3) while (z) { .. } with while (z) ... end

However the if modifier (if it works as in Ruby) doesn't work out very well. I haven't touched Perl in 9 years, so I don't know how different the operator precedence is if at all.

What's the deal with the if? Is it a regular modifier?

Oh really? Why don't you either stop spreading FUD, or back up that statement with some reality. "heard through the grapevine" - give me a break.

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