A Brief history of coding.
A Brief history of coding.
I’ve been coding for a little while. I was still a young programmer when the Unix wars happened. I’ve been writing Emacs lisp for decades now and working on Unix systems 15+ years longer. I also like creating languages. I have always had a special place in my heart for Unix. I was experienced enough when Microsoft came along that I was never interested by such an inferior system.
I learned to code a lot of things from the SysV developers manual vol. 2. I always seemed to end up writing infrastructure and publishing systems. I’m still fond of Troff.
I worked on a lot of monolithic systems in many domains. I was often the toolsmith and a systems architect. Both for the development environments and the architecture of the target applications that I worked on.
I was converted to using Emacs when I started work at SAS Institute in 1995. Everything was accessible in Emacs there. All the compilers and debuggers, the language references, programming modes, and even the cafeteria menus the gym schedule and instant messaging. It was just too much to resist.
I wrote a lot of code in a late binding objective language based on C , called XOB. The programming language I wrote there is still in use as far as I know. I also wrote a lot of elisp and python there. I also worked on or created debuggers, and modes for the languages I wrote and worked on and many other things. My memory blurs.
I know many tools and languages, C, Lisps, Elisp, Clojure, Haskell, Python, zsh and Unix tools seem to be consistently at the top of my usage list. I will still whip up a makefile or an AWK program if I have a need.
I prefer functional languages and lisps. I built a 4 year “big data” project in Clojure and Cascalog, it remains one of my most favorite languages. These days I’ve been coding a lot of elisp for the EMMS music system where I am happy to now be a developer.
I insist on only working on Open Software, and do my best to only use open software. I am very much anti-BigTech, GAFAM, anti-fascist.
my prefered computer system is arch linux or armbian for arm sbcs mostly because of arch’s bad relationship with haskell and xmonad on arm.
My window manager is Xmonad or Emacs’ Exwm, with which I am contemplating a full time switch. Xmonad is written in Haskell, my Xmonad configuration is here
My work environment is a very freshly remade custom configuration in Emacs with Meow I recently switched from Evil to Meow and back again after using Vi emulation the last 3 decades. I use Emacs for practically everything, including this website.
I also design and build computer keyboards using ARM processors. I have my own firmware which is built on the QMK I’ve had this for over 10 years and I’m in the middle of a refactor, since QMK has switched away from user directories.
I keep all my current projects on Codeberg.org
