I’m trying to set up a personal computing environment that I can rely on for the rest of my life. I told Justin that when we chatted recently, and I realize that I meant it. But what does that mean, exactly?
I don’t know, in an exact sense. But broadly, it means that I need a standard set of tools that I can rely upon. Even my beloved Emacs is getting changed out from under me by these fricking children. I will need to figure out how to build a version of Emacs that is roughly equivalent to what I have now, in perpetuity. (Currently I mostly use Aquamacs, which is based on Emacs 25.3. But it’s an ARM build, and runs on Rosetta so its days are numbered.)
They are also changing my beloved Perl. Removing things I rely on, such as smartmatch and soon …
I’m trying to set up a personal computing environment that I can rely on for the rest of my life. I told Justin that when we chatted recently, and I realize that I meant it. But what does that mean, exactly?
I don’t know, in an exact sense. But broadly, it means that I need a standard set of tools that I can rely upon. Even my beloved Emacs is getting changed out from under me by these fricking children. I will need to figure out how to build a version of Emacs that is roughly equivalent to what I have now, in perpetuity. (Currently I mostly use Aquamacs, which is based on Emacs 25.3. But it’s an ARM build, and runs on Rosetta so its days are numbered.)
They are also changing my beloved Perl. Removing things I rely on, such as smartmatch and soon GOTO, and adding weird syntax. They have no business doing language design. Maintainers should maintain code. Few understand this.
Common Lisp is out there. If I write code that, it will never break. As long as I never use any runtime-specific extensions, that is. It’s a viable option. I wonder how much of my Perl code I could reimplement in CL. Probably most of it. Tim Daly’s talk on Literate Programming said to (basically): “write code in Common Lisp; build with make; write docs with LaTeX.” Timeless wisdom. But I have not (yet) heeded it. Why not?
There’s a feeling that, at some point, I’m going to have to bite the bullet and learn C. Emacs and Perl are written in C. The OSes are as well. Smalltalk, underneath. Basically everything, underneath. Even the vaunted Common Lisp implementations are riding on a lot of C code.
Another idea I had, in the age of AI, is to write my own language implementation, and to use that for everything. For example, I don’t love the complexity of CL. And I don’t fully trust the Emacs and Perl maintainers. But what if I wrote my own Scheme subset that does just what I need? Or my own Perl subset that runs the code I care about?
Another idea is to join in & become one of the Perl helpers. Another is build Budd’s Smalltalk and add scripting capabilities and just go off and live in that world. The possibilities are endless.
I’m the author of ‘Jelec: the White Bear, or, Beware an Encounter with a Raven and his Friends.’ For my day job, I work as a technical writer at a software company. View all posts by logicgrimoire