[GoLUG] September meeting 9/6/2023

[Barry Fishman]

On 2023-08-28 02:10:32 -04, Steve Litt wrote:
> Barry Fishman,
>
> Would you like to do a presentation on whatever your favorite language
> is these days?

I really haven't done much new programming.  I have been mostly working
on changing my software environment.

  o I moved from primarily using an Arch distribution to NixOS.

    Arch was getting much slower at moving to new releases of software,
    and I disliked having such a fragile environment.

    I like the fact that with NixOS I can do a drastic change in my
    system configuration; have an upgrade hard fail or be unbootable;
    reboot the previous system; make any needed fixes; and when I have
    what I want, garbage collect away the old broken attempts.

    I can try a new app by installing it in a temporary environment to
    see if I like it.  If I don't, I can flush it from my system.

    I've been moving from Haskell 9.4 to 9.6.  As I got things working,
    I could try them out in a temporary environment, and then overlay
    the working versions onto my default environment, without worrying
    about any conflicting library versions. I can, if I find any bugs,
    instantly un-overlay it.
    
  o I moved from Gnome-3 to Gnome-4, and from X11 to Wayland.

    When Gnome went from GTK3 to GTK4, much of my graphical tools needed
    to be rewritten.  I used Vala rather than Haskell to write them.  I
    like programming in Haskell more than Vala, but the Haskell APIs are
    taking too long to trust.  Vala, to me, is a much better C (unlike
    C++).  I found, in general, the GTK4 tools I rewrote were worse than
    the GTK3 versions, so I still use the GTK3 versions of the more
    complex ones.  I looked at KDE, which has some very nice
    applications, but I really don't want to write anything using it.  I
    still hope PopOS's toolkit work will produce something useful.

  o I use Zsh (interactively).

    Although Bash is my login shell, My terminal windows now come up
    running Zsh.  The command completion system for Zsh is very nice,
    and it is easy to add completion and help for my own programs.

    I like typing a command like 'chmod 755 ' and it tab completes
    to the one file in the directory I have not made executable yet.

    I like that I can write a ./Update script for a directory, and it
    will show me the options (and descriptions) I built into the
    specific script.
    
    It does have supple language features that would make scripts easier
    to write (like better handling lexical scope), but the idea of
    relying on such an overly complex language, and stepping way from
    GNU is too much a barrier.  I do use the Rust rewrite of commands,
    like 'fd', 'rg', 'delta', and sometimes even 'exa' or 'bat'.

  o My Emacs (and Vim) environments have become more complex.

    I've move to using language server (LSP) based modes.  In Emacs I
    have used completion and help packages that are similar to what I
    later used in Zsh, and in scripts (using fzf).  But I avoid ChatAI
    like services.


In general I seem to be moving away from the smaller and cleaner systems
that most GoLUG members are interested.  When I have given presentations,
my focus on what I consider interesting parts to the systems seems to
bore everyone else.

-- 
Barry Fishman