winestock

Ann Arbor, Michigan (the location of the main University of Michigan campus) has a Church Street and a State Street, but they do not intersect.

I read a joke that went: In Ann Arbor, separation of Church and State is about three blocks.

You don't get too old to be relevant. You get too old to be cheap.

All of this goes to show that the Unix-haters were right.

The Tenex line of operating systems from DEC had built-in session management in the 1970s. Unix still doesn't have it. All non-trivial terminal handling was kept in user-space. Therefore, programs had to make assumptions that are now hard-coded in their very design.

To this day, the Linux and BSD kernels assume that they're talking to a VT100 with a few frills. The commercial Unix kernels were worse; I used a SunOS tutorial in the mid-90s that started me off on ed (yes, the standard editor; the man page even called it that without qualification) because Sun started out with an older version of BSD that assumed teletypes.

This has had consequences. The major reason why microcomputers took off was because an Apple ][ running VisiCalc could do things that a terminal connected to a mini/mainframe computer could not do.

Here we are, living in the future, where wristwatches have true color displays, and household appliances run webservers, but the correct, macho, hipster-approved user interface would be shamed by an Amiga 1000.

/rant

My take is that Clojure's community is distinct from that of other Lisp communities.

Old school Lispers are the Jacobites of the Computer Age. Their warnings were ignored, so their nightmares came true; and the world has changed so much, as a result, that few can even imagine an alternative. They were right about nearly everything, and now they are irrelevant.

So pour out a drink for the king over the water and for Genera. Curse this present dark age of bureaucrats and Posix. And then MOVE ON. The Clojurists are the first sizable community of Lispers that has done that.

Because then I'm reminded of all of the other things that have changed in the past five years. The essay needs a post-mortem, not a disclaimer.

Again, it's one of those things that I'll do in my copious free time.

I am the author of this essay and this is the umpteenth time that it has appeared in Hacker News. If you look it up using the Hacker News search function, it even invites readers to beat the dead horse one more time.

I'm surprised that it still gets so much attention. Every few months, someone volunteers to translate it into another language (see the bottom of the page).

I wrote that essay five years ago. Nowadays, just use Clojure or Racket and ignore what I've written.

And yes, I know, I really need to update the design of the site. I wrote it when I was still a rookie web developer. I'm starting a new job so I'll redesign my site in my copious free time.

American Airlines raises the wages of its employees to the market rate. As a result, investors pull money out of the entire airline industry in anticipation of rising wages everywhere.

Who says Wall Street can't take the long view?

I remember feeling scandalized the first time that I saw a banner ad on the web. I also remember the epic flame wars on Usenet (sic transit gloria mundi) when Canter & Siegel made the first commercial spam campaign.

At times, I have wondered how much of the Internet would shut down if ads were forbidden. Sometimes, that thought sobers me. Other times, that thought gladdens me.

This is such a cool hack. I love it. I want to make one, too. This guy is a true hacker.

Now it's time to nitpick. It doesn't seem that there's any way to generate key-codes.

Entering text is nice, of course, but that's not all that a keyboard does. How about cursor control (arrow keys, PageUp, etc.), function keys, or scroll lock?

One can make control-key combinations, but that limits one to what's available in ASCII. For instance, there's no way to distinguish Ctrl-j from the Return key.

That last point brings up something related. In ASCII, the Control key modifies the bit representation of the key pressed. That's why Emacs in terminal mode can't tell the difference between Ctrl-j, Ctrl-J, and Return. In modern user interfaces, the Control and Alt keys are specialized shift keys that let the OS and applications tell the difference.

Of course, one could do the same workarounds that terminal emulators perform, like using escape sequences and such. Then, while using this device, one would have to know the proper sequences for xterm, or vt420, or, or, or…

Still, nice hack.

EDIT: By the way. Some poor lost soul should be forced to use Emacs with this keyboard. Any suggestions on who should be condemned?