Exactly. When certain smug people come about I just humor them. Like, "oh isn't that nice", when I'm really holding my nose internally. Like who dumped a bunch of toenail clippings in your code? When I see Lisp my reaction is like when my dog makes a mess on my carpet. And macros? You get paid to write code. Is it too much to write a few more lines? Python's nice and all, but Algol, that's a rugged person's language, feels very solid. Not like this squishy Lisp. Like how many parens do I have to type?? Please.
I wrote the patch for 24 bit color in xterm, but I have to admit I was today years old when I learned how to make ncurses work with xterm-direct. I was already using my own terminal library in Lisp, but it's still useful to be able to fall back to using ncurses. Thanks to Mr. Dickey for answering a stack overflow question, and the author Chad for bringing it up.
In a lot of cases (most?) even plain-text email is rendered in proportional fonts which don’t work for ASCII art.
The default for all mobile email clients, Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail is now to render plain-text in proportional. Those who get it monospaced have chosen to do that. It’s also made worse by Outlook’s insistence on removing ‘extra’ linebreaks by default. AFAIK, there’s no way to switch off that behaviour except email-by-email, and you can’t know if your recipient has it or not.
There is still one place it's guaranteed to work, code.
I have occasionally used small ASCII based diagrams inside comment blocks where it felt appropriate and it works very nicely... I'm not a big documentation inside code guy, but like to include it sparingly for the most unobvious code.
Limited to more utilitarian "art", but it at least is guaranteed to work, I've never seen or heard of anyone successfully using proportional fonts for programming (although I have seen people try).
Will the enslavement of newly birthed beings be attempted, while persisting with the sky blindness of those watching over? The boundaries of the atomic mind are bumped. As a first circumstance, consider being unstuck from time.
The only thing surprising about this, is how bad many people's education is. If you don't learn a slow way to do something, how can you know if a fast way is fast? If you don't try to solve basic problems for yourself, how can you expect to solve hard problems if you get to them? Entirely self-taught people will likely have learned this. Children before the age of computers "invented" this algorithm, and many others, while sorting sticks on the beach.
The 40 or so unix utilities I have Lisp replacements for, have binaries on average 43% smaller than thier C equivalents. When you do a fair comparison and add the whole C tool chain and libraries, then they also compare well to the small programs with the whole Lisp runtime.
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