mdhughes

Which eggs? I'm on Mac, and in Chicken 5 currently, everything has "just worked". SDL required me to hit the SDL site for the frameworks, the rest I've used have had no external requirements.

Go ahead and invent some totally unique tool nobody's ever seen before. I'll wait. You, uh, you got one yet? No?

The point is to make your own version of a thing; it doesn't have to be one of those few I listed. To see that some other design or implementation doesn't satisfy you, and analyze why, and do it "right". You can only get that by writing something you can compare to something else.

If you do invent a thing for the first time—which you won't—it would be terrible. It'll take many iterations, your own or more likely someone else's. That's how Human tool-making works, from the first half-assed rubbing-sticks-together fire to nuclear weapons (the first Atomic Bomb was not the best…)

And to a certain extent, I don't consider people incapable/unwilling to do this "programmers". Merely typists.

Without the experience of making and supporting such tools, you'll never acquire wisdom, or many useful skills.

Thought.py is maybe my 4th note-taking system, simpler and more precisely what I needed than any previous. Practice makes perfect. Doing nothing makes nothing.

I'm one of the people who kicked in for the Megatokyo visual novel kickstarter. Years later, no visible progress; I'm not even mad, I knew exactly what I was signing up for, which was supporting a comic that had slowed to almost non-updating, and maybe getting a thing someday.

New comics are still weekly to monthly, if that. I've completely forgotten the origin of the current catgirl plot, but possibly Ping (or the catgirl she's based on?) will finally do something, maybe in the next couple years? Who knows.

The guy who drew "Sad girl in snow" isn't going to be one of your super productive Jack Kirbys, he muddles along as best he can, like a lot of us.

Strongly disagree. VS Code is a corporate tool IDE, which is dull and awkward to use as just an editor, and binary spyware in it "phones home" to its users' masters in Redmond. It's exactly what an MSDN subscriber would like, but dire for anyone else.

Atom is fun. It's easy to configure in weird personal ways, get rid of parts you don't use, add your own plugins, change CSS as you like. There's an insane number of plugins and themes. It's like emacs but organized and nice.

So far the statements from project owners in public and on Slack have been that Atom 1 & 2 development continues full speed.

If it is "killed" we'll just fork it and run up a black flag.

Very simplistic and shallow list, but it's by Charles Petzold, noted Microsoft shill and bad tech book writer.

In '96, LISP (tail end of the AI winter regardless), Perl (half the WWW was Perl), Tcl (maybe a quarter of the WWW and telnet-based services were Tcl), awk, & Ada were quite common, and Smalltalk, RPG, REXX, & PL/1 were at least as common as COBOL. Python was still obscure but gaining ground. PHP had just been released like smallpox on a vulnerable population.

I had a laugh at Delphi being for people who hate Microsoft. Its actual virtue was good performance and safety in large programs, you bought Borland tools because you wanted to double your program's speed, not for ideology.

Slack is a poorly-written Electron app, and unfortunately it's the poster child for it.

Discord does more with a fraction of the resources, and is also Electron. Atom is a giant editor framework, and is still less heavy than Slack in normal use.

Electron can run quite reasonably when you aren't an idiot/under complex enterprise requirements which probably explains Slack's load.

Cross-platform is the key problem.

If I want to write a Mac-only app, I can do that in Objective-C/Cocoa, and be quite happy.

For Linux, native means fighting with primitive C and X11 or Gtk, etc., which I can do but I loathe it.

For Windows, I have no idea, C# maybe? I'd rather eat broken glass than install Windows and find[ed.] out.

So if I'm doing cross-platform, my current working choices are Electron, Java, FreePascal/Lazarus, or Scheme.

Electron's easy to build all three platforms on, performance is OK despite the bloated example of Slack.

Java would need to bundle the JRE everywhere, and I've been largely Java-clean for 10 years.

Lazarus is semi-broken on Mac currently, only 32-bit like stone age tools, Cocoa port is unfinished. Maybe they'll get their shit together someday, I like it when it works.

Scheme native binaries are hard and experimental, but getting better.

Using a WKWebView on Mac, then writing a completely different wrapper on Linux & Windows, is unacceptable for my uses.

So my actual shipping code is Electron.

This is using Python 2, which is end-of-lifed. Those bare print statements are gauche. Python does have a variable keyword, `global`.

While JavaScript can omit semicolons, it's an incredibly bad idea outside of console/Node REPL. In particular it'll merge adjacent closures or constants, and you'll have an incredible time trying to find that error. Semicolon everything.

The arrow function as ()=>{} is clearer and less likely to suck up adjacent terms.

There's no point in even showing C#, since it's just Java with the capitalization swapped. Go, as well, but at least it's slightly different.

OP should learn some languages which aren't just FORTRAN-with-C-syntax, like Scheme (or any LISP), Haskell, ML, etc.

You can actually run LUA scripts from chat, exactly the same way:

``` /script d("Hello") ```

But the PC/Mac ESO community tends to be older (rated M) and less gullible in chat. Gold-sellers got a cold reception and rapid bans.

I suspect that'd work on console players, who tend to be younger, if they had scripting and addons, which they do not.

I'm not hostile, riffing on a cartoon is what humans call "humor".

While I have no problem with "Scheme is Spock", I'd put Captain Pike in his beeping wheelchair in the CLISP slot, and Clojure is clearly Kirk: All but married to the Enterprise.

But whooo, there's some tactless stuff in those PHP and Forth slots. And Javascript's a Scotty-type lang now, it's for getting engineering done.