Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra

Why indeed?

Christian Neukirchen (A.K.A. Anarchaia) pointed out a Mac OS X app called WriteRoom (there’s a Windows twin called Dark Room). It’s a full-screen text editor with absolutely no word processing features. No bold, no italic, no paragraph formatting, just text. As the introduction says:

Walk into WriteRoom and your busy computer life fades [...]

A small pet peeve: the use of goto in written English instead of go to. Is this the legacy of BASIC?

A Usenet posting sent me to a short article by Edsger W. Dijkstra titled Why numbering should start at zero.
Now, I have never used a programming language that wasn’t zero-indexed (like Fortran), but neither have I adopted the habit of numbering lists starting with zero.
I think the difficulty I have with zero-indexing is that in [...]

I’m currently enjoying Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. I’m only about half-way through it, and despite some inital scepticism I find his data more than a little convincing.
In the future Kurzweil sets out, everything will be a form of information. The bodies we inhabit and the world we interact with will be [...]

So I have been dropped from Planet Lisp, scarcely two months after being added. I wonder if that’s a record of some kind? Apparently, the maintainer found my tone too didactic and my knowledge too lacking. Fair criticisms both, but I meant no harm. I’m certainly not trying to set myself [...]

Hello, Lisp world! This is my first released Common Lisp code. Perl in Lisp is a Common Lisp interface to the Perl 5 API. It allows you to run a Perl interpreter embedded inside Lisp and evaluate Perl code. It does not require any C wrapper code — the API definitions [...]

Apple’s new Dashboard Widgets bother me. Not in a usability sense — they look quite useful, especially if they can be brought in and out of view quickly. What bothers me is that every widget looks completely different. Reading about user interfaces, the one clear mantra appears to be “consistency, consistency, consistency.” [...]

Or, How the Lisp-n Shall Inherit the Earth
Humans like to name things. Like ourselves, Homo sapiens, Latin for “Primate that has taken leave of its senses.”
Then there are engineers. Engineers like to name things too. Like SCSI, pronounced “scuzzy.” Or WYSIWYG, pronounced “wizzy-wig.” Or TTY, pronounced (I couldn’t believe this [...]

I think nearly all computer users can be divided into three broad categories based on way they think about computers.
The vast majority of computer users are application-oriented. They have training and experience exclusively with commercial software. They understand concepts peculiar to computers such as files, folders, saving, and deleting. They live in [...]