"I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out it was an awful lot of fun. Of course the paying customers got shafted every now and then and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them setting them off in new directions and keeping fun in the house."
- Alan J. Perlis
themodelplumber 1470 days ago [-]
"How dare you insinuate that my latest amateur radio transceiver firmware is capable of loading a working copy of Contra for the NES!"
Feynman wrote that his Nobel prize came from his determination to have fun while computing.
To quote, he makes the following observation:
“Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing–it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with...
I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”
He started looking to have fun with physics, and claims the breakthroughs came from that.
hugs 1469 days ago [-]
When I founded my previous start-up, I used to describe my job as "professional creative play". I got some serious anger from a few employees about that description. So I stopped saying that's what I do, but it's exactly what I do.
mpfundstein 1469 days ago [-]
As the founder of the company you serieus anger from YOUR employees?
Huh?
yoz-y 1470 days ago [-]
It's a compelling quote but I think the seriousness came when bugs in software started to cause major mayhem in the real world. Yes please keep fun in computing, but keep the fun where fun belongs.
willberman 1469 days ago [-]
Like most things in life, I believe the answer involves finding balance between the two :)
throwaway_pdp09 1470 days ago [-]
I think this Perlis comment is not really related to the subject, which is clearly a bit of fun and good on it for being so, but the bit about Perlis feeling not responsible for "successful error-free perfect use of these machines" badly puts my back up. I'd say over my career I've lost literally years to shitty software and its twin, shitty documentation.
To the extent that you are responsible for the errors in these you are very responsible, else you're wasting amounts of human capacity (and generating it's twin, unhappiness) proportional to the size of your user base, and that can be absolutely huge.
Or could be I'm taking his quote just a bit too seriously.
willberman 1469 days ago [-]
Ha! I would agree that you might be taking it a bit too seriously. I was trying to make the point that sometimes things that might seem purposeless are useful simply because they are fun, scratch an itch, and might lead to a new way of looking at something. That exploratory process might be worth it in certain projects even if it introduces more bugs accidentally. I should have elaborated more rather than just leaving a quote. After all, quotation in absence of analysis contributes very little novelty.
perl4ever 1470 days ago [-]
The quote says "we in computer science". I'm not sure I've been impacted by computer scientists in that way. Although, I don't think of any random person with a CS degree as being "in computer science".
cscurmudgeon 1470 days ago [-]
From the Q&A:
How do i stop the cube from spinning
no
yjftsjthsd-h 1470 days ago [-]
Really, the whole FAQ is gold.
rhizome31 1470 days ago [-]
Make sure to sure to check the issues as well.
ISL 1470 days ago [-]
It was a wonderful chaser to https://xkcd.com/2287/ , which I encountered minutes before.
Humans are good.
perl4ever 1470 days ago [-]
I suspect that cartoon implies a deep and chilling insight. COVID-19, or HIV, people notice. But does that mean we notice everything? The greatest vulnerability of pathogens is our brains, so wouldn't that mean strong evolutionary pressure to mess with our brains in such a way that we don't notice we're ill? How much of human social evolution is driven by that?
I don't think the molecular tools available to wildlife are sophisticated enough to achieve what you are describing (i.e. messing with higher-ish cognitive functions). This would be like modifying our proprioception but ALSO the perception of others ?
folli 1469 days ago [-]
I'm just worried that a T4 bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria) is talking about infecting humans...
khazhoux 1470 days ago [-]
Ctrl-X Ctrl-C
signaru 1470 days ago [-]
millions of other devs: "how do i exit vim"?
amiga 1470 days ago [-]
I've been using vim for years...because I can't figure out how to close it.
Oh man - that is the best first post. The issues are fantastic.
doctor_eval 1470 days ago [-]
This is awesome. The best kind of programming: doing something for the fun of it.
Also, what is Nim? How popular is it? What popular products is it used in?
Would it be a useful language for a python developer to learn? I have a friend who is a python dev and he has lamented that he’d like to learn something else. Should I recommend nim? Is it good for numerical analysis?
eindiran 1470 days ago [-]
Nim is a relatively small programming language that uses a Pythonic style of syntax. It adds some features that make it better suited to systems development, like type safety and better performance. It can be compiled using a few backends, to eg C or JavaScript.
Nim recently hit 1.0 and has grown a lot of the years, but it still isn't particularly common to see in industry. You can see some Nim related projects on GitHub: https://github.com/topics/nim
I used it to write a few things/just play around with in the pre-1.0 days, and found it quite nice to write and easy to read.
Nim is not a “small language”; it’s huge in scope, both domain and range. It is well thought out, so that you don’t need to be aware of all of it to be effective, though.
It’s community is comparatively small, but it is incredibly helpful, smart and capable.
girvo 1470 days ago [-]
> isn't particularly common to see in industry
You're completely right, but I can say I've introduced it for writing custom developer tooling across three companies, including one very large rather well known one in the travel space (though that was pre 1.0)!
sp33der89 1470 days ago [-]
What was your experience like using Nim for those projects?
girvo 1470 days ago [-]
Wonderful; though I've been using it for quite literally years at this point. It's pretty rapid compile times, coupled with easy-as-anything C integration meant writing performant CLI tools or daemons with it was a breeze.
The nicest part of Nim I feel is that it was super easy for non-Nim programmers to pick up and understand. The team would regularly contribute to the tooling despite not using it anywhere near as extensively as myself, which I think speaks volumes to it's ease-of-use
jonahx 1470 days ago [-]
How does it compare with Go and Rust?
kungtotte 1470 days ago [-]
I haven't written any Go, and only a little Rust, but it competes with both of them in a way.
It's safe and GC'd by default, but you can trivially swap GC or you can run entirely without GC and do everything manually. It's idiomatic to use managed references but you can do unsafe pointers if you want. Interoperability with C is easy but not seamless like with for instance Zig.
Compile times are excellent compared to Rust, as are binary sizes, making static binaries is trivial (which is harder in Go from what I understand).
I find the syntax easier/better than Rust with fewer special characters, but compared to Go I think the syntax is a wash.
It requires very little boiler plate, and let's you do things that cut down on code size like using `var` or `let` statements in blocks:
var
intVal: int
strVal: string
I like the distinction of var vs. let over Rust's let mut/let as well.
The two major weaknesses at this point are package availability and documentation. There's a package for everything in Go and Rust land, and there's lots of documentation for everything. There's quite a handy standard library in Nim and most of what you typically need in the Nimble package manager, but sometimes you'll run into the situation of having to roll your own X.
rezeroed 1470 days ago [-]
It's a pleasure to use compared to Go. (Also, has generics).
logicchains 1470 days ago [-]
What are Nim's compile times like? I write a lot of C++, and by far my biggest issue is compile times for large projects. I'd love a systems language that had decent compile times for template-heavy code.
sp33der89 1470 days ago [-]
As girvo mentioned, compile times are really fast. Might not be as fast if you're heavy user of metaprogramming but it's still really good.
> Note: While Nim is compiled and does not offer an interactive REPL yet (like Jupyter), it allows much faster prototyping than C++ due to extremely fast compilation times. Arraymancer compiles in about 5 seconds on my dual-core MacBook.
PMunch 1470 days ago [-]
Really fast! Even with heavy meta-programming it stays fast. As an example bootstrapping the latest stable release on my machine takes 1m06s. This is a process that involves compiling the compiler multiple times, just compiling the compiler takes 41s (i7-4770K, so not a sloth of a processor, but still).
cpach 1470 days ago [-]
For a fun example of some Nim action, check out this DSL that can generate SVG files and GIF animations:
As someone who loves Nim and uses it a lot, I'm a little wary of recommending it as a faster Python. Nim takes from Python its whitespace sensitive syntax, as well as its "batteries included" standard library. But other than that, the two are very different languages with some major philosophical and semantic differences. That said, I much prefer Nim to Python. If you can live without a robust library ecosystem and are interested in a fast, easy to use language, Nim is a great fit.
sp33der89 1470 days ago [-]
> Would it be a useful language for a python developer to learn
Does he only know python? If so I'd say yes, Nim looks like Python but it's semantics are quite different and it performance a lot better. Also Nim <-> Python interop is nice too.
Besides what eindiran said, your friend could also take a quick peek at: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-Python-Programm... and for numerical stuff Nim's ecosystem is quite young for it but people are working hard on it: https://github.com/HugoGranstrom/numericalnim
I'd say go for it!
joppy 1470 days ago [-]
Nim has a heavy focus on metaprogramming using both templates and macros, and so the syntax is designed to be very permissive, and parse (but not understand) a very wide grammar so that users can write macros/templates to transform them. Kind of a middle ground between lisps which have very little syntax, and complete syntax extensions to languages which require compiler extensions so the compiler can even parse the file.
thelazydogsback 1470 days ago [-]
Funny thing is, I think this is just about as useful as every attempt I've ever seen (real or Hollywood) to add value to GUI by adding 3D gfx...
A lot of people said it was silly, and I think IIRC the help pages for it used to have cheeky comments like "Why? Because we can." There's probably a good reason it was deprecated, but I thought it was useful for debugging my often deeply nested DOM layers.
pierrec 1470 days ago [-]
I wanted to try this out, and the closest thing I found is this bookmarklet for Chrome:
It appears to still work and it even sort-of works on Firefox except for the mouse-click feature that shows the sides. Clearly not as polished as the old Firefox feature though.
Whatever man, compiz-fusion was the best productivity tool around when I was a kid.
dheera 1470 days ago [-]
I loved compiz-fusion for productivity -- especially being able to draw on the screen was super useful for meetings and presentations. Being able to zoom the screen was also useful.
It's a pity it's no longer maintained.
CarVac 1470 days ago [-]
Alas, I never got the chance to give a presentation and draw on the screen with fire. I always wanted to.
KDE has zooming built in nowadays.
def8cefe 1470 days ago [-]
Longest part of any new install was finding the perfect window decorations.
neutronicus 1470 days ago [-]
I miss the cube with the workspaces on it. I actually think it was helpful for remembering which stuff was on which one.
em-bee 1470 days ago [-]
exactly. having different workspaces mapped onto the cube was actually a practical effect.
the same with wobbly windows. they'd only wobble when moved, which makes the effect practical, as it doesn't get in the way.
i hoped this vim cube would do that too. map different buffers onto the faces, and rotate the cube as you switch buffers, but otherwise stay out of the way to actually let me work
mFixman 1470 days ago [-]
I had a transparent cube desktop so I could see what was going on the other faces of the cube.
Being a master hacker during that time was fun.
starky 1470 days ago [-]
Beryl was the shit when I was in high school. Those wobbly windows were mind-blowing at the time.
timw4mail 1470 days ago [-]
KDE still has the ability to have wobbly windows...it's always one of the first things I change...normal windows are boring.
thelazydogsback 1470 days ago [-]
Sorry to harsh your mellow in these trying times dude
JKCalhoun 1470 days ago [-]
Yeah, thinking we'll see this in Hollywood soon. Maybe "Jurassic Virus: The Beginning".
neutronicus 1470 days ago [-]
Must not do much CAD
0xff00ffee 1470 days ago [-]
This is a really funny comment to me for many reasons.
I've been saying this since Jurassic Park came out and the Unix UI was basically 3D. Around that time I had some labmates in the mid 90's that thought GUI logins should be skeumorphs that involved doors, keys, and tunnels. And it got worse from there.
Fast forward from 1993 to 2013 and I met a guy working on a 3D version of ... Atom editor I think? I was a fucking trainwreck to look at, but damn he was putting his all into it.
jsjolen 1470 days ago [-]
Now we just need to render Emacs onto a tesseract.
ashton314 1470 days ago [-]
Is that what the `C-x 4` keybinding is really for? /s
willberman 1470 days ago [-]
M-x apropos tesseract
mhd 1470 days ago [-]
Or the lament configuration.
0xff00ffee 1470 days ago [-]
If you consider arrow keys as 2D, and the Vim's edit/control mode as a 3rd dimension, EMACS is already up to... 12 dimensions? Good enough! Ship it! :)
juped 1470 days ago [-]
In the 2000s we used to do this, but with the proverbial Linux Desktop.
Oh man, compiz-fusion is what got me interested in Linux. I remember seeing videos circa 2007-8 of people's desktops with all sorts of crazy stuff. Cube desktops, wobbly windows, fire trails, etc. I spent forever figuring out how to dual boot Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows and learned a ton so I could setup these effects. Fast forward 12 years and now I only use Linux on servers without a desktop interface at all.
While this stuff may seem silly and pointless, you'll never know who it'll inspire to dive in to a whole new world. I'm glad it's being maintained still
fenwick67 1470 days ago [-]
Same here, compiz was directly responsible for me trying out Linux on CD
divbzero 1470 days ago [-]
It’s silly but loads of fun. My first Linux was also Ubuntu c. 2007-2008 and I got a kick out of using a cube desktop that neither Windows nor Mac had.
lfowles 1470 days ago [-]
Whatever happened to the promise of cube desktops with wobbly windows?
the_pwner224 1470 days ago [-]
I am using Wobbly Windows right now in KDE. Desktop Cube works too but I don't like it (I use 16 desktops instead of 4 :).
When I have to use Windows every once in a while I am viscerally disgusted by the lack of wobbly windows. Moving windows just feels wrong - very, very wrong. Takes a second to realize they're not wobbling. To me it makes the computer seem less robotic and more natural in a way, I guess. Like haptic feedback on smartphones when you tap stuff.
O_H_E 1470 days ago [-]
Exactly what I told my sister few months ago. The windows just feel stiff and unnatural.
rossy 1470 days ago [-]
I don't know about you, but I've been running wobbly windows up until about a month ago, when I disabled KWin's compositor in favour of picom for performance reasons. I hope to get them back when I'm able to start using KWin on Wayland.
O_H_E 1470 days ago [-]
I still use both on KDE Plasma desktop. Life is great.
Many other options like fire-on-window-close and zooming are also available.
I believe you could get them just using kwin the window manager.
Nullabillity 1469 days ago [-]
FWIW, if you don't see them as options: make sure that the KWin compositor is set to OpenGL mode, rather than XRender.
thinkling 1465 days ago [-]
I'm very late to this discussion, but... in 1999 we did this at Microsoft running unmodified Windows apps in a custom 3D environment.
Can someone make this work in VR and multiplayer? I can imagine it’d increase productivity if you could fly to someone’s cube and collaborate by doing Minority Report gestures.
mulmen 1470 days ago [-]
Yeah if people stopping by my desk in an open office is good then people dropping in to my desktop environment must be better.
leshokunin 1470 days ago [-]
It’s basically the remote work equivalent of asking for TPS Reports
kovac 1470 days ago [-]
Judging by the feature requests in the open issues, I'd say we are witnessing the inception of the text editor of the century.
I quite appreciate these kinds of posts. Fun and silly, yet make you think about the way computers work outside the box.
Kuinox 1470 days ago [-]
Outside the box... Oh thanks...
the_duke 1470 days ago [-]
I much prefer to see fun hacking projects here over all the non-tech submissions that increasingly take over the front page.
kyuudou 1470 days ago [-]
I agree with this! I mean, it's Hacker News after all, not "yet another Covid-19 article shoehorned in from Techcrunch" News !
saagarjha 1470 days ago [-]
This is great, especially the Q & A.
Symbiote 1470 days ago [-]
Your username reminded me what was once my favourite clothes shop in London. Their aesthetic is a bit further from a spinning-cube-Vim than it used to be.
- Alan J. Perlis
-People who give me hope
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBE-BQNaCh4
To quote, he makes the following observation:
“Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing–it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with...
I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”
He started looking to have fun with physics, and claims the breakthroughs came from that.
Huh?
To the extent that you are responsible for the errors in these you are very responsible, else you're wasting amounts of human capacity (and generating it's twin, unhappiness) proportional to the size of your user base, and that can be absolutely huge.
Or could be I'm taking his quote just a bit too seriously.
Humans are good.
Also, what is Nim? How popular is it? What popular products is it used in?
Would it be a useful language for a python developer to learn? I have a friend who is a python dev and he has lamented that he’d like to learn something else. Should I recommend nim? Is it good for numerical analysis?
Nim recently hit 1.0 and has grown a lot of the years, but it still isn't particularly common to see in industry. You can see some Nim related projects on GitHub: https://github.com/topics/nim
I used it to write a few things/just play around with in the pre-1.0 days, and found it quite nice to write and easy to read.
Regarding your question about numerical analysis and Python, this post touches on using Nim for tasks that you might reach for numpy for: http://rnduja.github.io/2015/10/21/scientific-nim/
This one has a brief comparison of Nim and Python + numpy: https://narimiran.github.io/2018/05/10/python-numpy-nim.html
Note that both are for pre-1.0 Nim.
Nim's site: https://nim-lang.org/
It’s community is comparatively small, but it is incredibly helpful, smart and capable.
You're completely right, but I can say I've introduced it for writing custom developer tooling across three companies, including one very large rather well known one in the travel space (though that was pre 1.0)!
The nicest part of Nim I feel is that it was super easy for non-Nim programmers to pick up and understand. The team would regularly contribute to the tooling despite not using it anywhere near as extensively as myself, which I think speaks volumes to it's ease-of-use
It's safe and GC'd by default, but you can trivially swap GC or you can run entirely without GC and do everything manually. It's idiomatic to use managed references but you can do unsafe pointers if you want. Interoperability with C is easy but not seamless like with for instance Zig.
Compile times are excellent compared to Rust, as are binary sizes, making static binaries is trivial (which is harder in Go from what I understand).
I find the syntax easier/better than Rust with fewer special characters, but compared to Go I think the syntax is a wash.
It requires very little boiler plate, and let's you do things that cut down on code size like using `var` or `let` statements in blocks:
I like the distinction of var vs. let over Rust's let mut/let as well.The two major weaknesses at this point are package availability and documentation. There's a package for everything in Go and Rust land, and there's lots of documentation for everything. There's quite a handy standard library in Nim and most of what you typically need in the Nimble package manager, but sometimes you'll run into the situation of having to roll your own X.
For example see: https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer in the README it mentions:
> Note: While Nim is compiled and does not offer an interactive REPL yet (like Jupyter), it allows much faster prototyping than C++ due to extremely fast compilation times. Arraymancer compiles in about 5 seconds on my dual-core MacBook.
https://github.com/bluenote10/NimSvg
Pretty cool!
Does he only know python? If so I'd say yes, Nim looks like Python but it's semantics are quite different and it performance a lot better. Also Nim <-> Python interop is nice too. Besides what eindiran said, your friend could also take a quick peek at: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-Python-Programm... and for numerical stuff Nim's ecosystem is quite young for it but people are working hard on it: https://github.com/HugoGranstrom/numericalnim
I'd say go for it!
A lot of people said it was silly, and I think IIRC the help pages for it used to have cheeky comments like "Why? Because we can." There's probably a good reason it was deprecated, but I thought it was useful for debugging my often deeply nested DOM layers.
https://github.com/chrisprice/explodz
It appears to still work and it even sort-of works on Firefox except for the mouse-click feature that shows the sides. Clearly not as polished as the old Firefox feature though.
It's a pity it's no longer maintained.
KDE has zooming built in nowadays.
the same with wobbly windows. they'd only wobble when moved, which makes the effect practical, as it doesn't get in the way.
i hoped this vim cube would do that too. map different buffers onto the faces, and rotate the cube as you switch buffers, but otherwise stay out of the way to actually let me work
Being a master hacker during that time was fun.
I've been saying this since Jurassic Park came out and the Unix UI was basically 3D. Around that time I had some labmates in the mid 90's that thought GUI logins should be skeumorphs that involved doors, keys, and tunnels. And it got worse from there.
Fast forward from 1993 to 2013 and I met a guy working on a 3D version of ... Atom editor I think? I was a fucking trainwreck to look at, but damn he was putting his all into it.
While this stuff may seem silly and pointless, you'll never know who it'll inspire to dive in to a whole new world. I'm glad it's being maintained still
When I have to use Windows every once in a while I am viscerally disgusted by the lack of wobbly windows. Moving windows just feels wrong - very, very wrong. Takes a second to realize they're not wobbling. To me it makes the computer seem less robotic and more natural in a way, I guess. Like haptic feedback on smartphones when you tap stuff.
Many other options like fire-on-window-close and zooming are also available.
I believe you could get them just using kwin the window manager.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-tas...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1Ds9CeG-VY
https://github.com/paranim/pvim - A Vim-based editor for Nim https://sekao.net/paravim/nim/
So what the fuck is what? paranim? paravim? pvim?
You're still a pleb, only "richer".
Yes. Any particular reason you think it shouldn't?
I prefer to see people's personal fun hacking projects on HN to news I can read elsewhere.
> Is everyone else waiting for the April job threads too?
An early one went up last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665398
https://www.cyberdog.net/