This looks great! I too have been working on a critter tracker[0], but writing it in C using kcgi[1] (no JS at all).

I have never done a web project before, so this has been a great learning experience. I still have some functionality to complete, but so far it has been pretty useful, even just the "available now" feature.

[0] https://xvetrd.tilde.institute/index.cgi

[1] https://kristaps.bsd.lv/kcgi/

I would have to check, but the resources on lex/yacc that I remember would make a point of their usability at scale. Generally it would be unlikely to wrote a faster lexer than what lex could do, but very likely to write a better parser than yacc. However writing a small lexer and/or parser _quickly_ would be easier with those tools than hand rolling one almost every time. Its great parser generators are still being developed and improved, and its fine to point out issues, but this article misses the point by a wide margin.

The author's math works out to a bit over 2 hours a book. I assume this was elided because thats wild to expect.

I would have been more convinced if the author posted their list of books, with page and/or word count, and math'd from that.

For what its worth, my speed is between 1 to 3 minutes a page, depending on size and subject matter. At best, 2 hours would get me through a novella, a moderate sized book of poems, or maybe one of Plato's dialogues. That actually sounds right. But most books are longer than that.

in situations like this "one bad cluster of comments" isn't considered a mistake or a lapse in judgement but a symptom of what a person actually thinks. RMS more than likely did not form those opinions on the spot and then forgot he had them afterward. and RMS has a public history that is congruent with those opinions and how he presented them.

im sure it leaves a bad taste in a lot of mouths what the leader of GNU has done and how he thinks.

The "Hard CC" isn't a power move its how things get done. I constantly check in to make sure I'm doing my job right and when I am and the problem isn't fixed, its time for it to be someone else's problem.

source: working in Support.

> maybe even playing with colors to indicate if verbs form a train or other composition. I understand that is a quite different problem from just substituting @: with o̲.

With regards to how different of a problem that would be, J's syntax is context-sensitive. If you were to accurately identify trains and forks, you could not use regex, and would probably end up implementing a subset of the J parser.

J has a first-class citizen self tokenizer in the standard lib as a dedicated state machine ( ;: ) https://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/d332.htm

For an example of a very incomplete and largely suboptimal parser that uses the above: https://github.com/Rscho314/J-compiler/blob/master/ast.ijs

Charles Moore did that with Color Forth and even though only he was using it, I remember several comments on how that is unfair to the color blind or visually impaired which is an interesting point.

ColorForth has a color-blind mode, but I do not remember the details.

The main idea is to change visual representation instead of using delimiters. Different fonts or text sizes sizes or cursive/inverse/underline are also valid ways of displaying different "colors".

Yes I remember that reply which came from him, but forgot to mention. It is an interesting idea.

If you only read one book, I suggest Don Quixote, the Grossman translation particularly, if only for the higher quality footnotes (compared to Lathrop's which is very well translated but poorly commented). The advantage here is DQ is really like four or five books of various types, and has a Yale Open Courseware series attached to it, so for any chapters you want to know more about, the resources are at hand. Through this book you can learn so, so much about literature.

But also, watching Don Quixote and Sancho's friendship develop is heartwarming. It was a book written for entertainment first, and just happened to be saturated in intense philosophical and literary quality.

I've started and failed to complete this book many times. Yet I've loved what I read. There are many who believe this is the greatest novel of all time.

i actually just finished reading it last night. probably one of the best bits of fiction ive read.

Why?

i think you might be making metaphysical claims, while the topologist is not. moreover, in topology, things dont.become other things or kinds of things; they stay as they are and the (simplified) statement "a staw is a donut" means "a straw is similar to a donut in that they share certain qualities." there is never any actual stretching of an object to change its metaphysical identity, that is a virtual process (and one that has rules and restrictions) that is used to help humans wrap their head around the concept of homotopy.

is for->fer Utah? I'm in Indiana, born on the West Coast, and I dont know where I picked that up. I have also started to morph "car" and similar in the direction of "kerr," and (most embarrassingly) instead of "robot" in conversation ill say "robit." I havent been able to find out from those around me, or hear the same changes.

No idea where it'd originate from, but in central Utah it's common. A few others I've remembered include (similar to fer) your -> yer, our -> are, really -> rilly, prescription -> perscription, sale -> sell.

Robit is pretty funny, like a frog? Haven't heard anything like that.

A random YouTube search shows what I'd consider representative for the area, at least around my age, only a couple of fers though. Overall fairly "neutral". https://youtube.com/watch?v=k3IdMkc-aD4 Your sibling mentioned a similarity with Appalachian people, maybe some of it is a mountain thing, though if they had in mind anything like https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bn8O6Nx3C6w I don't really hear much similarity.