At one of my first jobs, I was tasked to rewrite a bunch of legacy Perl scripts in Python and the unless lines always made me trip up. I don’t know why but it really messed with my mental flow when reading Perl code
It's nice. "if", "then", and "else". I spent a year programming a shitty roulette game on an Apple 2e back in high school. I still remember the joy of using if/then/else paired with goto to make a horrible mess of spaghetti logic.
Using a standalone ‘else’ would tickle my brain in the same nice way that being able to declare a variable inside an ‘if’ statement as if it were a ‘for’ loop (which you can do in modern C++) does.
I haven’t written any Ruby for years, but I still praise it in every conversation I have regarding programming languages. It’s basically a much simpler Python, with some design ideas that are both beautiful and deeply strange.
Ruby was designed to evoke joy and they absolutely succeeded. Usually, programming is mostly a means to an end to me. But using Ruby just feels so amazing, it’s almost impossible to even describe to somebody who has never used it before.
Was working on a server where I did not want to put some dumb command into the history, so I add a space like you do. Press up. The command is there. The fucking insult I felt.
ed, the “standard editor” (according to its man page) and the predecessor of vi (the “visual editor”), is a terminal editor that doesn’t automatically display any of the text you’re working on; you have to use the p (“print”) command to display the lines your wish to see.
If you have a Linux or Mac handy, you can trying it out! It’s…kinda wild. If you know some Vim commands that start with :, there’s a good chance they’ll work in ed, except you don’t type : itself (effectively you’re always in “command mode”).
There’s also a novelty Twitter account, @ed1conf, that tweets about ed.
Some coworkers told me a story about a previous job candidate who said his preferred editor was ed. They thought it would be really interesting to see someone actually use it. But during the actual interview, when he opened ed, he didn’t recognize or understand it; he was actually accustomed to a graphical editor that he thought was called ed because he apparently did all his work on a system where someone had symlinked or aliased ed to a modern tool.
Legislation (which feels similar to programming languages sometimes) seems to have some keywords of its own. I remember seeing a lot of Whereas … and Having regard to ….
I legitimately back up my history file. Mostly because it likes to truncate itself randomly (though this may have been fixed in zsh, or my config, because it’s been a while). Just a systemd timer that triggers a shell script to copy it by date and rotate anything older than 100 copies.
Edit: WHY DID I SAY ANYTHING? After like 3 months of no problems, my history truncated itself to 3 entries a few minutes ago. I’ve only ever seen a few days of loss before that lol.
That’s one thing I like about zsh, or my config at least, because I use i3 and therefore tend to open lots of shells. History is mostly local until I hit return twice (two empty prompts) at which point I can get history from other sessions. It’s stuck more global at that point though aside from future history.
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