Xah Lee

I regret being so cynical about this post and the book I mentioned.

It's a really nice book. Lots of beautiful illustrations and interesting ideas with code snippets for generating those illustrations. I found it fascinating as a kid. The message wasn't too important for me, and I didn't really have the background to draw my own conclusions from it anyway.

Someone on IRC, who was a big fan, introduced it to me.

I actually started programming with this very book, copying the examples from it into Python and then Scheme (introduced to me by that same guy) and Common Lisp. I respect Wolfram's dedication. It's the type of dedication that brings us things like Mathematica and TempleOS.

The guy who introduced me to this book and then Scheme had contacts at Wolfram Research and later sorted me out with a free copy of Mathematica. I could never have afforded that with my pocket money, and I wasn't at university yet. He was a big underdog in the community and had his own problems too. What a great guy.

He's still going strong today: http://xahlee.org/

There's something to be taken even from book like this. It would be good to revisit and re-evaluate the book as someone who now has a semblance of an education in the area. I wish I didn't sell it.

Frankly, this is sidetracking the topic a bit, but that's one of the things I hate about Vim.

The freaking movement keys. The amount of rationalizing about them is INSANE. CRAZY. MADNESS. "Touch typing"/"more efficient"/bla bla, with 0 studies backing it.

Why do I say this? They shouldn't be in a line. No mass manufactured device in the last 30+ years has them in a line. They're... you know, up is up, down is down, left is left and right is right. Yet some people will defend the setup to their deaths.

And the reason they're like that is... because a terminal 50 years ago, that probably only sold tens of thousands of units, at best, had the setup like that to make it cheaper to produce:

http://xahlee.info/kbd/history_of_vi_keys.html

It's basically the QWERTY keyboard story all over again.

Backwards compatibility is a major pain in the neck.

> If you don’t (need to) care about Unicode, maybe

Perl has had strong unicode support since Perl v5.12 (~2010).

references:
1. http://xahlee.info/perl/perl_unicode.html
2. https://stackoverflow.com/a/6163129/12458

> If you think pythons package management is not disastrous enough, maybe.

Huh? I've used PAR::Packer with great success since 2005.

> If you do not (need to) consider Windows, maybe.

Microsoft used to ship Perl scripts to work with COM and WMI with their NT4 and Windows 2000 resource kits. Perl works *extremely* well with Windows.

I mean, there are lots of reasons to choose Python over Perl, but IMHO, these are not those reasons.

I use Perl as a better-bash. If I was writing a modern website, a large application, or any ML related work...I'd choose Python. But for complex system administration, I'm picking Perl. YMMV

I'm not suggesting that you support "contempt", but the person behind the writings, and only if you enjoy the writing style.

Also, Xah also has all sorts of other documents were he carefully tries to avoid the mistakes he criticizes in other documents, and were contempt is not the main driver. I'm sure he spent countless hours writing those materials and he's made those documents available for absolutely free! [1]

The best intellectual and artistic endeavors are deeply flavored by the emotions of their authors, which gives the works a measure of authenticity. I personally can appreciate that, the same way I can also appreciate a lot of forms of dark humor.

Also, I'm OK with others not sharing that appreciation.

1: http://xahlee.info/comp/comp_lang_tutorials_index.html

In like '00 I got painful carpal tunnel syndrome symptoms after working intensely as a full-time developer for 3-4 years.

The solution was: Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro (Photo: http://xahlee.info/kbd/Microsoft_natural_keyboard.html) plus a fantastic heavy-duty "telescopic" keyboard/mouse tray that Ikea designed and sold for a few years.. You screwed it into the bottom of the desktop. The key was allowing the keyboard to be angled slightly away from the body, while also allowing it to be as close to the legs/knees as possible - thereby minimizing the wrist angle.

Is anyone aware of any modern replacements for the above? DIY/mechanical? (Mostly the keyboard itself - would love a mechanical keyboard witht the same 3d layout.)

Those far keys are usually triggered by your weakest fingers -- return, for example, is triggered via your pinky and can often require you to stretch your pinky (and ulnar nerve) in unergonomic ways, leading to Cubital Tunnel Syndrome.

I find that a good introductory layout to this kind of keyboard is the Kinesis Advantage 2 [1]. As you can see a bunch of common keypresses usually delegated to the pinkies have been set on the thumb clusters. On my Ergodox, I also have symbols layers that allow you to reach common symbols without moving my fingers significantly from the home row. It definitely takes an adjustment period but my RSI definitely thinks its worth it!

[1] http://xahlee.info/kbd/kinesis_keyboard_howto.html