Piers Cawley writes about programming languages, Perl, Emacs, and software design, plus a post on running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL.
HN links it for the bakery-on-Emacs-and-PostgreSQL post and for his essay on falling out of love with a programming language.
As someone who is enjoy eating a lot of bread (part of my Balkan culture), I'm baffled to see so much hesitation toward bread when I go abroad. I'd frequently get plenty of food in restaurants, but not so much bread with it. Even if I get it, either it is something old or "too much white" for my taste (this means there is nothing in it useful for the body).
Although we have plenty of bakeries with fresh bread 24/7, I recently started to make my own with bread maker I got as present few years ago (some Moulinex). It was sitting in a box and I decided to try it before sell it or give someone.
I can say, this ended up pretty well. I always liked chemistry (mixing and weighting stuff, calculating compounds) and this happens to be essential part of bread making. After few failed attempts, my bread finally started to get desired shape and taste; my family started to like it as well.
The best part is that I know what I'm putting in (I'm not so much fond of general food industry) and as a geek, I introduced some geekish stuff as well. Although bread maker automates lot of things, I'm using Emacs and ledger-cli [1] to track compounds I'm adding, including comments about finished bread. This way I can always pull what worked the best, what not and total amount of compounds I spent in a week or month. TBH, this article [2] was inspiration for tracking with Emacs.
Still tons of stuff to learn, but "the project" ended up funny and very enjoyful.
[1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/
[2]…
Obvious objections - JS has no tail call elimination, no macros, and state-changing is managed with entirely different conventions in Scheme. Also the conceit of SICP (not really justified) is that they don't have to teach you syntax, because homoiconicity. Still, I think it's a worthy pursuit to try to bring the insights of this book to a wider audience.
Side note: the navigation is really irritating. The back button only works sometimes, because it's replacing content without doing some kind of pushState. So you have to hunt for links.
Another side note: Sean Burke and Piers Cawley have ported some of mjd's excellent book Higher-Order Perl to JavaScript. This might be even better, because both Perl and JS have C-like syntax hiding some impressive functional capabilities. I wish someone would finish that, but I guess few people even know about HOP, these days.
http://interglacial.com/hoj/hoj.html
http://www.bofh.org.uk/2010/11/18/higher-order-javascript
> how about recommended levels of vitamin D? That's directly influenced by pigmentation.
People generally don't consider dark skinned Indians and dark skinned Nigerians and dark skinned Peruvians to be the same race because they all have dark skin. They're just as different from each other as they are from me despite having more melanin.
> It seems apparent to me that there are at least _some_ cases where the social construct of "race" is useful in a clinical setting.
The concept of skin pigmentation is useful for things related to skin pigmentation. The concept of "race" is still artifice and absolutely the least useful proxy there is for whatever you're actually trying to measure in any given moment.
> Playing Devil's Advocate here
Please don't. https://bofh.org.uk/2018/10/25/devils-advocacy-without-tears/
Corel's office suite has a scripting language if I recall. My grandfather in law learned enough of it to develop a few systems for managing family finances, gifting (it's a large family), etc.
Emacs is notable. It requires learning a bit of elisp programming but, like a browser, is basically a development environment that gives you access to a windowing system, input from the user, image rendering, text buffers, etc. Plenty of people write their own tools to manage particular workflows.
Update
Examples of emacs as folk interface:
- https://bofh.org.uk/2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/
I don't have much to add to this but it reminded me of this blog article about running a bakery business on Postgres and Emacs https://bofh.org.uk/2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/ there's also a few more articles on that blog about his transition from Software Engineer to Baker. I have no idea if he stuck with it, maybe you could reach out to him?
Edit: although the website is down the Twitter and Facebook pages for the business still seem active.
However even Jim Weirich doesn't like Rake being called a "DSL".
I think Piers Cawley was dead on by calling things like this a Pidgin
refs:
* http://www.infoq.com/interviews/jim-weirich-discusses-rake
* http://www.bofh.org.uk/2007/08/08/domain-specific-pidgin