janneke @janneke@octodon.social

I like guix a lot. It requires a little extra work but I like the control I have over everything. It reminds me of haskell's way of handling impure functions: at first it seems like a lot of work just to do some unsafe IO, then you get used to it and realize it's forcing you into good habits.

re: climate change

Surely you've been wondering, when on earth is @librelounge going to talk about ActivityPub? Especially since I'm co-host and that's a major part of my work!

Well, here's an episode that's *entirely* about ActivityPub! https://librelounge.org/episodes/episode-12-activitypub-part-1.html

It's the second in a series about federation. There's more coming!

BTW, if this interests you and you're a student, maybe you'd like to work on "guix deploy" as a summer project? @dthompson and myself are interested in mentoring "guix deploy" and related tooling for GSoC this year. https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/GSoC-2019#Guix_Deploy

Just think! You could spend your summer hacking lisp/scheme/guix/functional-distros/etc!

Had to help my son with his computing assignment in Python and realised for the first time it's not the great teaching language it's made out to be.

His problem came down to shared references, which I found hard to explain as it's quite far removed from the simple programming model that Python presents to the beginner. Reflecting on it, we've widely adopted a Python coding style which works around the issue but clearly it's a problem for beginners.

Still think SICP and Scheme is the best path.

Roses are dead
Violets are dead
Everything's dead
Climate change

#scheme #sicp

sci fi 50 years ago: what if humans of many different backgrounds worked together for a common good

sci fi now: what if computer bad

I love how friendly and non-territorial the #racket IRC channel is.

People are discussing various Schemes and their features and someone says, before choosing your dialect, check out Andy Wingo's blogpost, Wingo being the lead developer on Guile, Racket's "competitor".

GNU Mes: Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap

Old recipe: yoghurt, add yoghurt to milk

https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/gnumes/

Guix Days blogpost: bootstrapping ARM https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2019/guix-days-bootstrapping-arm/

When I talked to Guix, Nix and Mes people around FOSDEM, I learned that Nix people are interested to learn from and reuse the work on reducing and making more readable the bootstrap input to Guix, and that some branch was already in place for testing things out, and I was very happy to hear that.

Now I noticed that already the December release notes for mes 0.19 explicitly mention ongoing Nix work.

www.joyofsource.com/gnu-mes-01…

Ich möchte auf meiner Webseite auch Veranstaltungen eintragen von #freiesoftware z. b. Die chemnitzer Linux Tage und eben auch andere. Hat jemand eine Idee wo ich solche #Termine herbekomme?

I have this feeling that a lot of ActivityPub's success (aside from the good parts of its design and let's face it the popularity rush that came from Mastodon's uptake) came from having an accessible "tutorial" style overview section in the spec with a story to it (something not a lot of specs have) https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview

I'd like to hear from implementors though... was this true for you? Did that section make a difference in helping your understanding?

If you've ever wondered what the big fuss about open source vs free software is, read this:

"Open source is designed to advance the intellectual property of the corporation at the expense of effort by individuals outside the corporation. As such, it falls under corporatism, as defined in John Ralston Saul's dictionary The Doubter's companion. Open source is all about externalising costs for development and testing, as economists would say"

(source: http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/jargon/allinone-index.html)

Here's @drak's Wisp: Lisp, minus the parentheses https://bitbucket.org/ArneBab/wisp

Arne gave a talk about it at this FOSDEM, highly recommended: https://video.fosdem.org/2019/K.4.201/experiencewithwisp.webm

I've written about it before: https://dustycloud.org/blog/wisp-lisp-alternative/

And, relevant to Golem, here's downloading chunked files over a p2p network in Wisp code: https://bitbucket.org/ArneBab/wisp/src/cca15c7abc86a500a313315344f9f46bc90e9ce8/examples/downloadmesh.w?fileviewer=file-view-default

Does Lisp have any pros or is it all cons?

Bootstrapping a compiler is rather like yoghurt: https://bootstrappable.org/