Random Mumbling In September
What are blogs for if not for the random mumbling of a confused mind. Yep you are in for one of those posts again.
I am actually writing this post in Emacs. Yes I usually use Vim but though a series of events I had the urge to mess with Emacs. I like them both but found Emacs to be RSI inducing and have been settled on vim for some time.
However I kind of like how Emacs makes the REPL style of programming so easy where with vim I just can't quite get it set up correctly (on windows), honestly I probably just want to play with Emacs again. So I installed Emacs. The first thing I did was to install Evil.
Evil is essentially an clone of vim inside Emacs, ok, it does not quite go that far but you do get all the nice functionality you find in the default vim installation. The joke is Evil finally creates a good text editor for the Emacs operating system.
So far I have not put much else onto my Emacs install. I customized Evil a bit to get it closer to my vim set up. I think I will leave it like that and do some coding in python and JavaScript to get used to Emacs before I start to extend it.
One important thing I have learnt from using vim was to watch out for things I do repeatably and attempt to automate them. Automatically compiling when saving a file is the classic one. It only recently occurred to me that I should also set up automatic saving when I enter normal mode. I have typed 'jk;w', the sequence to enter normal mode and save the file in my vim set up, so many times that it has become a reflex. I save every time I enter normal mode so it should be automated. This would save a lot of key presses over the period of a year.
It just did not occur to me until a few days ago I should be doing that. That was a lesson for me, anything that becomes a reflex should be automated and keep a sharp eye out for it.
I am going on an Emacs journey I am just not sure how long we will travel together for at the moment.
I am currently reading "Coding the Matrix", it is slow going just because I am quite busy. So far I am only about 80 pages in and it has only covered material I have learned elsewhere. It is reading fairly well, the examples are interesting and it seems to be striking the correct balance between code and theory. Of course I know a reasonable amount about linear algebra so I have no idea if this would be a good book for someone learning it. I am only a little over 10% of the way through the book I don't know if it will take a downturn at some point.
Changing threads again. It has been interesting watching Phasor (A JavaScript gaming library) make its way to version one. The programmer struggled with Typescript and eventually dropped it in favor of JavaScript
It was not so much the Typescript language but he was hitting bugs in the compilation of such a large project. The interesting thing was watching him pick up momentum and enthusiasm for the push to version one once he switched.
He says he will still write games in Typescript so again not an attack on the actual language, probably the take away about Typescript is don't try to create something big using tools that have not reached version one of the product or at least until it is stable if the product seems to be in eternal beta.
The other take away is tooling really matters. Having a smooth process really help motivation to work on something. This is particularly important for home projects where you are not being paid to work on them.
Ok that is enough random mumbling from me.
I am actually writing this post in Emacs. Yes I usually use Vim but though a series of events I had the urge to mess with Emacs. I like them both but found Emacs to be RSI inducing and have been settled on vim for some time.
However I kind of like how Emacs makes the REPL style of programming so easy where with vim I just can't quite get it set up correctly (on windows), honestly I probably just want to play with Emacs again. So I installed Emacs. The first thing I did was to install Evil.
Evil is essentially an clone of vim inside Emacs, ok, it does not quite go that far but you do get all the nice functionality you find in the default vim installation. The joke is Evil finally creates a good text editor for the Emacs operating system.
So far I have not put much else onto my Emacs install. I customized Evil a bit to get it closer to my vim set up. I think I will leave it like that and do some coding in python and JavaScript to get used to Emacs before I start to extend it.
One important thing I have learnt from using vim was to watch out for things I do repeatably and attempt to automate them. Automatically compiling when saving a file is the classic one. It only recently occurred to me that I should also set up automatic saving when I enter normal mode. I have typed 'jk;w', the sequence to enter normal mode and save the file in my vim set up, so many times that it has become a reflex. I save every time I enter normal mode so it should be automated. This would save a lot of key presses over the period of a year.
It just did not occur to me until a few days ago I should be doing that. That was a lesson for me, anything that becomes a reflex should be automated and keep a sharp eye out for it.
I am going on an Emacs journey I am just not sure how long we will travel together for at the moment.
I am currently reading "Coding the Matrix", it is slow going just because I am quite busy. So far I am only about 80 pages in and it has only covered material I have learned elsewhere. It is reading fairly well, the examples are interesting and it seems to be striking the correct balance between code and theory. Of course I know a reasonable amount about linear algebra so I have no idea if this would be a good book for someone learning it. I am only a little over 10% of the way through the book I don't know if it will take a downturn at some point.
Changing threads again. It has been interesting watching Phasor (A JavaScript gaming library) make its way to version one. The programmer struggled with Typescript and eventually dropped it in favor of JavaScript
It was not so much the Typescript language but he was hitting bugs in the compilation of such a large project. The interesting thing was watching him pick up momentum and enthusiasm for the push to version one once he switched.
He says he will still write games in Typescript so again not an attack on the actual language, probably the take away about Typescript is don't try to create something big using tools that have not reached version one of the product or at least until it is stable if the product seems to be in eternal beta.
The other take away is tooling really matters. Having a smooth process really help motivation to work on something. This is particularly important for home projects where you are not being paid to work on them.
Ok that is enough random mumbling from me.
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