W
@cy @screwlisp @mousebot @cdegroot @ramin_hal9001 @kentpitman @dougmerritt
It's Twitter Culture. We're all supposed to speak in sound bites. Dorsey or whoever decided if you can't fit it in 130 chars, it's not worth saying. Then at some point they doubled it and thought that was generous enough.
And now short posts are what people expect.
LJ never had a limit.
Hell, **Usenet** never had a limit and we were suffering under far worse resource constraints back then.
I miss Usenet.
@screwlisp @dougmerritt @mousebot @cdegroot @ramin_hal9001 @kentpitman
figuring out how to split up a toot is solving the wrong problem. In my cases I *know* how I want to split it up.
what I want is the ability to create a sequence of posts, edit them all in place, shuffle text around + attach media and polls wherever I want, get them all looking right,
and then send them all in one fell swoop.
I think the key concept is being able to compose a reply to a draft.
i.e., In-Reply-To is a buffer rather than a URL
Posting the reply automatically posts the In-Reply-To **first**. And likewise for longer chains.
Make that work in a reasonable way, and everything else follows.
(I'm up to 5000 chars in my draft reply on codeberg...)
@screwlisp @mousebot @dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @cdegroot
yay, actual experience, actual review.
thanks.
@dougmerritt @screwlisp @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @cdegroot
given that I once-upon-a-time wrote a MAPI client for the sake of being able to post to Microsoft Exchange forums in rich text using courier font, in theory, I should be able to do this.
... but that would mean I'd have to Learn Fediverse. crap.
hmm. Anyone have experience with
mastodon.el - Emacs client for fediverse servers that implement the Mastodon API.
Codeberg.org (codeberg.org)
i.e., is the best one or if this just Guy Who Grabbed the Name first and did the best SEO twigging? (I hate that google search has gotten so enshittified)
(also, thanks, LazyWeb!)
@dougmerritt @screwlisp @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @cdegroot
what I *currently* do is compose inside Emacs (the *only* non-painful alternative for long posts),
then manually decide how I'm going to break it up -- which actually has some literary content to it, because in some cases, you *do* want to arrange the breaks for maximal dramatic effect
(generalized How to Use Paragraphs)
Problem 1 being that emacs doesn't count characters the same way as mastodon does, and I don't find out until I've cut&pasted part n, which doesn't happen until I've already posted parts 1..n−1
Problem 2 being having to cut&paste in the first place when I should just be able to hit SEND (which then has to be from within emacs).
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
> I also recall '~' being an important character
ok, I seem to be out-to-lunch on this
(or at least, remembering Something Else; but I can't imagine what...):
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/teco/emacs11/emacs11.tec
(admittedly, this is VAX/PDP-11 TECO source for Emacs and maybe Fred had to do a complete rewrite of some sort and the actual TOPS20/PDP-10 source is completely different -- given that there *is* significant dependence on wordsize and other architectural issues, it would have to be *somewhat* different -- but I'd still expect a lot of common code [unless there were copyright issues]).
It *does* definitely look like line noise, though.
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe '~' was prevalant in Emacs source, or I'm conflating TECO with Something Else.
By my era VT-52s were gone, you'd occasionally see a VT100 in a server room for not wanting to waste $$ there, the terminal of choice at Stanford CS was the Heathkit-19 + if you were in one of the well-financed research groups, you got a Sun-1 or a Sun-2. At DEC(WSL) where I interned, it was all personal VAXstations.
I do recall Emacs ^S and ^Q being problematic due to terminal mode occasionally getting set badly (and then the underlying hardware would wake up, "Oh, flow control! I know how to do that!", ^S would freeze everything and you had to Just Know to do ^Q...)
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
(I'm guessing a mastodon UI that actually respects the use of surreal numbers to number multipost components and rearranges threads accordingly will be implemented approximately never.
… though I suppose it could turn out to be one of the more creative ways to get kicked off of the Fediverse … )
(𝜔/2)/11
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
hmm... is there a way to do a reply that is *also* a quote-post? I should try this.
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca To the point where, the following summer as an intern, I was needing to write a tree walk, and I wrote it in FORTRAN — because that's what was available at AT&T Basking Ridge (long story) — using fake recursion (local vars get dimensions as arrays, every call/return becomes a computed goto, you get the idea…) because I wanted to see if this *could* actually be done in FORTRAN, and it could, and it worked, and there was much rejoicing; I think my supervisor (who, to be fair, was not really a programmer) blue-screened on that one. And *then* I tried to explain it all to my dad... 8/11
Mastodon (mastodon.murkworks.net)
(𝜔+1)/11
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
I also recall '~' being an important character that showed up a lot in TECO for some reason,
and *normally* the only time you'd see sequences of ~'s in large numbers was when your modem was dying and your line was about to be dropped
and this may, at least partially, be where TECO's "line noise" reputation came from.
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
it's not so much the editor itself, which, from your description doesn't seem that much worse than, say, what you had to do in IBM XEDIT to get stuff done,
but the macro system, specifically, which as I understand it,(1) was an add-on, (2) would have needed utility commands that one didn't use in the normal course of editing (e.g., for rearranging arguments + building control constructs) and therefore were put on obscure characters, and *this* is where things went nuts…
I recall briefly viewing the TOPS-20 Emacs sources … *did* look like somebody had whacked a cable out in the hall (time to hit refresh-screen)
… granted, I may be misremembering; this *was* 40 years ago…
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Yeah I had <1 year stuck on DEC-20s at Stanford before Unix boxes became generally available (originally had to be an RA on a grant with its own VAX, and incoming students on NSFs typically weren't). Seeing Gosling Emacs that first spring, it was clear that was The Future...
⟹ less reason to do TECO
... though ironically, I *did* learn the SAIL editor (SAIL/WAITS -- TOPS-10 derivative -- was, by 1985, a completely dead software ecosystem, *only* continued to exist because Knuth and McCarthy had decades of crap + sufficient grant $$ for the (by then) fantastic expense to keep it going; the only other people who used it were the 3 of us maintaining the Pony (vending machine))
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
... and, crap, I messed up the threading (it seems 9 and 10 are siblings, so you'll miss 9 if you're reading from here. 9 is kind of the point. Go back to 8.)
(I hate this UI. If anybody's written an emacs fediverse-protocol thing for doing long threaded posts please point me to it, otherwise it looks like I'm going to have to write one ...)
𝜔/11
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
To be sure, my Perl tends to be more structured.
On the other hand, I also hate Moose (Perl's attempt at CLOS) and have thus far succeeded in keeping that out of my life.
I also remember there being a time in my life when I could read and understand APL.
But if you do think it's possible to come up with some kind of useful formal definition/criterion for "expressiveness", go for it.
I'll believe it when I see it.
11/11
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
You may say that untyped lambda calculus and SKI combinatory calculus and so on) are all *dreadful* in terms of expressiveness, and I will probably agree,
... but it also seems to me that Barendregt got pretty good at it.
I'm also guessing TECO wouldn't have existed without there being people who managed to wrap their brains around it and found it to be expressive and concise. I myself never got there (also never really tried TBH),
... but at the same time, it's *still* the case that if I need to write a one-liner to do something, chances are, I'll be doing it in Perl, and I've heard people complain about *that* language being essentially write-only line-noise.
10/11
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
And, to be fair, by then, he had changed jobs/companies, moved up to the bottom tier of management, wasn't using The Computer anymore, so maybe the interest had waned.
But it struck me that I was never able to get past showing him the factorial function and,
"That can't possibly work."
He had basically accepted the FORTRAN model of things and that was that.
Later, when he retired he got one of the early PC clones and then spent vast amounts of time messing with spreadsheets.
9/11
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
To the point where, the following summer as an intern, I was needing to write a tree walk, and I wrote it in FORTRAN — because that's what was available at AT&T Basking Ridge (long story) — using fake recursion (local vars get dimensions as arrays, every call/return becomes a computed goto, you get the idea…) because I wanted to see if this *could* actually be done in FORTRAN, and it could, and it worked, and there was much rejoicing; I think my supervisor (who, to be fair, was not really a programmer) blue-screened on that one.
And *then* I tried to explain it all to my dad...
8/11
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
... in Pascal.. And there I finally learned about and was able to get used to using recursion.
Although I'd say I didn't *really* get it until the following semester taking the assembler course and learning about *stacks*.
It was like recursion was sufficiently weird that I didn't really want to trust it until/unless I had a sense of what was actually happening under the hood,
And THEN it was cool.
7/11
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
Then there was the section on call-by-name (the default parameter passing convention for Algol)
... including a half page on Jenson's Device, that, I should note, was presented COMPLETELY UN-IRONICALLY because this was still 1972,
as in, "Here's this neat trick that you'll want to know about."
And my reaction was, "WTFF, why???"
and also, "That can't possibly work, either."
Not having any actual computers to play with yet, that was that for a while.
Some years later, I got to college and had my first actual programming course...
6/11
@dougmerritt @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
This was post-Algol-68, but evidently the DEC folks were not happy with Algol-68 (I found out later *nobody* was happy with Algol-68), so ... various footnotes about where they deviated from the spec; not that I had any reason to care at that point.
I encountered the recursive definition of factorial and I was like,
"That can't possibly work."
(the FORTRAN and Basic manuals were super clear about how each subprogram has its dedicated storage; calling one while it was still active is every bit an error like dividing by zero. You're just doing it wrong...)
5/11
