October 2020

2020–10–16, Friday

Listening to music while working form home office. It seems a lot of my time is spent performing lately. At work I lecture, create exercises, invent master thesis topics and give improvised reserach talks to the group’s PhD students. Even being with the kids at home has some element of performance to it. Then it is nice to consume a bit of someone else’s work.

I am more and more aware of the process of creation in music, writing, film and art in general. More than before I am aware of the artistic choices made. This allows me to enjoy the works in a way I did not before.

2020–10–26, Monday

Hearsay about Tcl. I have never tried Tcl, and today I found a thread on HN which made me never want to try it:

J-Kuhn said:

If someone asks me of a small snippet that describes some fundamental thing about TCL, I will respond with this:

set a puts
$a "Hello World"

A command is just a list. Substitution is done before executing it. That’s why [set] requires the variable name, not $variable.

adwn said:

Python:

a = print
a("Hello World")

Rust:

fn puts(s: &str) {
    println!("{}", s);
}

let a = puts;
a("Hello World");

C++:

#include <cstdio>

auto a = puts;
a("Hello World");

Also: every FP language ever. How is that a fundamental thing about TCL?

Also probably all shell scripting languages, like Bash:

a=echo
$a Hello World

gecko said:

The way I’m used to seeing the GP’s example made is

set a pu
set b ts
$a$b "Hello!"

which I think does a better job showing how the mixture of strings with interpolation allows for some slightly unexpected things.