Been using Perl since the beginning… essentially every time I needed to write a shell script more than 10 lines long I used Perl … eventually was also using it for web back end stuff too … kind of like duct tape. I still use it today if I need to write more than 10 lines of a bash script.
I remember writing a Prolog(ish) interpreter in Common Lisp in an 90's AI course in grad school for Theorem proving (which is essentially what Prolog is doing under the hood). Really foundational to my understanding of how declarative programming works. In an ideal world I would still be programming in Lisp and using Prolog tools.
Speaking as someone who just started exploring Prolog and lisp, and ended up in the frozen north isolated from internet - access. The tools were initially locked/commercial only during a critical period, and then everyone was oriented around GUIs - and GUI environments were very hostile to the historical tools, and thus provided a different kind of access barrier.
A side one is that the LISP ecology in the 80s was hostile to "working well with others" and wanted to have their entire ecosystem in their own image files. (which, btw, is one of the same reasons I'm wary of Rust cough)
Really, it's only become open once more with the rise of WASM, systemic efficiency of computers, and open source tools finally being pretty solid.
I can tell you, from the year 2045, that running the worlds global economy on Javascript was the direct link to the annihilation of most of our freedom and existence. Hope this helps.
It is not nostalgia. It is mathematical thought. It is more akin to to an equation and more provably correct. Closer to fundamental truth -- like touching fundamental reality.
It's the whole idea of 'apps' before smartphones became a thing.
It's also the simplicity of how these worked, forget multitasking, just focus on one thing at a time.
No subscriptions! Either the applications were free or it's a one-off fee/shareware kind of thing.
And it's ofcourse nostalgia, I made my first game for Palm OS over 20 years ago, it was nice to revisit it and get familiarized again with how the whole build system worked.
When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the bus between Boulder and Denver back in 1999 or so, and being amazed that I could play an actual computer game on a handheld device.
"I have fond memories of some z-machine interpreter on the Palm that I found easier to play with than anything on my desktop computer. There were lots of shortcut buttons and thanks to the stylus it was still easy to use those (vs a touchscreen using ony fingers where you need huge buttons to hit). You could also tap any word in the output to bring up a context menu of actions (e.g. to examine or pick up objects mentioned in room descriptions) and that list of actions was a combination of a configurable global list and a game-specific list you could add actions to. Could play through entire games and barely ever have to type anything. Had a folding keyboard, but no memory of using that for interactive fiction."
Uhm, the context menu on words was a thing on the ZMachine (v3) port for the Game Boy too.
I launched Tristam Island under a Chinese Game Boy Colour clone and some rewritable USB cartridge. The games where playable enough with patience.
On smartphones, FDroid for Android had the Anysoft keyboard with a swipe option, it works great, much better than typing. There's also some grafitti 'keyboard' input at FDroid, but I prefer the swiping one as it's far superior.
On the old T9 phones, OFC a Frotz port exists for J2ME, but I didn't try it.
There were many keyboard accessories for Palm OS devices!
I had a foldable one with (almost?) full-sized keys that I really enjoyed using. It connected via infrared, which was a bit strange but made it compatible with different generations of device connectors.
Mobile app developers, if you haven't read Zen of Palm, I highly recommend this piece of art. You can download the PDF for free. Nothing beats Palm for its simplicity, responsiveness, and (perhaps subjectively) ease of use, even to this day.
Unfortunately that link to the Zen of Palm PDF is broken (at least from my work machine). I couldn't find it in the Internet Archive either. Any suggestions?
The amount of energy and creativity. I had an orange Handspring Visor. By default it did not have any networking. It had a cradle that you would sync up with your desktop, but the desktop software could pull stuff from the Internet. So indirectly, the Handspring Visor could access content from the Internet that had been previously retrieved. There was an amazing app that was kind of like Yelp. You could enter your location by specifying two cross streets, and then you could search businesses and read reviews. I used this PDA to manage my calendar and my contacts. With a limited amount of email. In the year 2000 I was using this thing exactly the way we all use our smart phones today. And the games were so much fun. It was truly a machine that could do anything.
Developing for is was a fun challenge. I had a device that had 4MB of memory total. This was RAM, Data, and application space. I created an "app" that had plugins. When you ran the HotSync is asked which plugins you wanted to "install", then based on which ones were installed it copied over the data you needed.
I loved the documentation. It might be the only SDK documentation I read with joy. It just clicked with me.
Gremlins. I liked this program as well. I don't recall if it was a simulator only or if it ran across on device. You could tell it to just wreck havoc on your app. I would set it up to run over the evening or weekend and I would just fix any bugs that occurred during that time. It would click every button, add weird text to all input boxes, just smash everything. It found many issues for me. When I came back over the weekend and there were no issues, I shipped my app. I still had users running it up until 2010.
It was probably nowhere near as good as I remember, but I remember it being damn near perfect. I lovingly kept my Trio(s) well into the age of the touchscreen smartphone.
I loved that you could freely beam apps from one device to another via the infrared port. I remember sharing apps with my friend and my mom at one point, sending and/or receiving.
50% of all men below 50 have an online sports betting account.
Hmmm .. you might have to back that stat up. I am guessing there are men who have several accounts and over counting is happening. Or that was just made up like 62% of all statistics.
Even with that link I have trouble believing it myself.
Like how was this data/survey gathered/administrated? Sample size ect...
Also I don't understand how sports seem to get so much attention. Like they are just games why?
Another post I was reading a bit ago was how Spain what basically suffering internet outages to stop pirate streams of games on the weekend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
Like why is a game considered so important that even internet traffic has to suffer. It boggles my mind.
> Like why is a game considered so important that even internet traffic has to suffer. It boggles my mind.
Because that game makes 1.8 billion dollars a year in TV licensing rights [1], and pirates undercut the pay-TV stations' ability to recoup these expenses.
Add in a ... questionable legal system, club and league presidents with friends with very very deep pockets, cloud providers that don't care what they host as long as the legal system of their host country absolves them of liabilities and that's how you get inane rulings like this.
I don't find it hard to believe at all. Here's an incredibly unscientific way of looking at it:
I'm 27. Among me and a hastily-assembled list of 14 of my male friends, 7 of us definitely have at least one sports betting account, 4 definitely don't, and I'm not sure about the other 4. I'd bet (heh) at least one of them has an account.
It might be more informative to see how many men actually use their sports betting accounts. Technically I have an account, but I haven't used it in over 2 years. Won a bet that the Heat would beat the Celtics in the conference finals, realized I was now net-positive by several hundred dollars, cashed out, and uninstalled the app. Never looked back.
>It might be more informative to see how many men actually use their sports betting accounts.
A sibling poster posted a link to Siena survey that has related betting statistics. For males the percentage that "have accounts" vs those who "had accounts" is 30% and 6% respectively. You see similar ratios in the age breakdowns. Therefore it's safe to say that around 40% of males below 50 "have" betting accounts.
It would be difficult to loosely follow any major league sport and not know it was legal, regardless of age. The ads have been everywhere. These companies have user acquisition costs well over $100.
If you didn't know it was legal, you're probably well outside the target audience.
There's a difference between having an account and actually using it.
I suspect the amount of US men who regularly bet on sports is much, much lower.
That being said: I find sports extremely boring. If I had a lot of social pressure to watch sports, I'd probably gamble, just to keep the game interesting.
To be fair, at some point I registered in one of those sites because a bar had 50% discount on the tab or something similar for first time account registration. I don't even live in the states, was just visiting.
Yeah, I registered with every single one I could find when they all had $300 bonuses, just took the bonuses, made 99% sure bets on everything (bet $300, win $300.01) and cashed out about $3000 and never touched them again.
50% off for punching a lewd name, some bigco support phone number, a made up birthday and your spam catchall email into a web form seems like a pretty good deal.
I'm definitely skeptical of this. When my state legalized sports betting there was around 6 or 7 books that came online and they ALL had pretty juicy sign up bonuses, like "bet $5 and get $250 in free bets." Damn right I signed up for all those books to get the free bets and converted those into cash by doing safe moneyline bets.
I don't bet at all (excluding the financial markets), but I'm often surprised at how many of my relatives and people from all walks of life pull out their phone and fire up an online betting app. All men.
Remember when Snow Leopard came out? No new user features. It just ran faster. Greatest OS release in history. Why can't Apple just do that again with one of their OS's?
I don't understand this narrative anymore. The yearly macOS changes are objectively minimal. It's a mature platform. This year, a new design and a few power user features (Spotlight, Shortcuts, tidbits like Call Screening/Hold) and framework overhauls (Metal 4), that's it. Heck, new design excepted, I doubt Snow Leopard added fewer features than Tahoe.
Snow Leopard was mainly framework overhauls, but they're still doing those, year after year, only piecewise. People praise Snow Leopard as a golden release, but early on it was very buggy and, for many, slow (I still remember). It only became great after refinement. Now Tahoe seems stable enough (not counting minor UI glitches) that even Ableton/Pro Tools/SPSS/AdobeCC and other frequent troublemakers work fine on release day, an unusual feat. The "downhill" narrative seems to be nothing but baseless nostalgia.
Everybody also forgets that Apple always did yearly macOS releases except for a short gap around the iPhone and iPad introductions. That's not new either.
It's no surprise that it had lots of bugs because it rewrote lots of components. But the power of storytelling (and remembering via most-upvoted Reddit comment) has turned it into the perfect release.
