You'll also be able to use GPLv3 packages that you couldn't use with MacOS :thinking_face:

I hope that's an Intel version of iMac.

Ya, it is late 2013 model. 3.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, with 32gb RAM.

My late 2012 iMac was running 10.12 and the SSH HD had problems so that I could neither repair it nor update the O/S. So I replaced it with a Dell all-in-one running Windows 11 / WSL2 (Ubuntu) and that's how I do all my Clojure dev now. And that's after being an Apple customer for 30 years.

Lots of software had begun to refuse to work on 10.12 after regular updates.

Aside from the HD -- which wasn't impacting my dev work -- it was still plenty fast enough so I was kind of sad to have to junk it in favor of a new machine. But at least my desktop and laptop match now so I'm not constantly trying to switch between macOS/Windows key mappings!

What do you mean by "begun to refuse to work"? They detect the version and it doesn't run the apps because of "policy"?

Yeah, some apps have a minimum supported macOS version. I can’t upgrade at least one app to the current version on macOS 10.15.

What are these apps? XCode? 😮

Microsoft Edge was a specific one I remember (but it was the underlying Chromium engine -- and therefore the Chrome browser as well). After an update, it started to warn that it would stop working on 10.12 "soon" and then about a month after that was an update where it then refused to startup at all.

I asked MS about it -- I'm in various "Insider" programs -- and their engineers said the check was upstream (in Chromium) and they didn't plan to modify Chromium to continue supporting 10.12.

But, yeah, several apps stopped working after regular updates, introducing minimum o/s version checks.

Kinda the same deal on an old iOS device, you just can’t use the latest versions of apps. (sez me who is still using an iPhone 5s!). Each app developer has to decide the cost/benefit of supporting old OSes.

I loved my old 5s... even after my wife upgraded to the XS, I kept my trusty little ol' 5s for another year or so (before switching to my first Android phone).

My wife has the XS, an Apple Watch 6, two iPads -- but I did recently switch her back to a Windows desktop (because the Mac desktop she wanted was just too expensive). I have no Apple devices at all now.

But I’m kinda a goofball maybe. I decided to take on Clojure, the language with the highest salary, as my primary hobby in a frugal “retirement”. Hence, my caution at spending bucks on new hardware.

Yeah a switch away from Apple might be more sensible for a frugal lifestyle.

My "ding" price used to be about $2,500 for a laptop or a desktop but as I shifted to only using laptops for personal stuff, that's come down to $1,500 (while my desktop threshold has stayed the same). And that has held true for decades even back when $2,500 was a lot of money (I had PowerBook 520c that had a list price of nearly $3k).

Yes

In addition to optimizing Clojure, are you now also optimizing number of words you type @UK0810AQ2?

I don’t like the price of Apple stuff, hate the lack of repairability and upgradeability, but love the low power consumption of the new M* chips.

Interesting, 3k in 1994 adjusted for inflation is maybe… 6k in today dollars.

Yes

I'd rather have shorter battery life than being treated like a peon granted the privilege of using a shiny toy. You could probably get more use out of it using Nix

@UK0810AQ2 I’m not sure if I can say this succinctly, but I’ll try do so with as few words as possible. You might consider optimizing further with a Y. Or, if you prefer to use fewer pixels, (I’m not sure I have not counted them), the lowercase y.

Ambiguous syntax, does Y stand for yes or Why?

I still find it amusing I fell backwards into performance to win a real life internet argument

y

Javasaurus architect (love that guy) kept calling Clojure slow and I took that personally

Well, we all benefit from your duel!

MacPorts has binaries and source packages with support all the way back to even OS X Tiger. Of course, unsupported OS versions are supported on a best effort basis. But anecdotally, anything newer than OS X 10.11 still has pretty good support. Most of your Homebrew packages, if not all of them, should already be there, too. EDIT: Of course, the long term action is to eventually move to Linux (or even Windows...) if you want to avoid Mac OS 11+ and still want a secure system with modern software

Thanks @U0479UCF48H, very helpful!

Check out the archives too. Really amazing stuff given to the world with passion

I absolutely love stuff like this. Some other good sources are Bret Victor, probably the GOAT and an inspiration to loads of others: http://worrydream.com/ Nicky Case: https://explorabl.es/ Steven Wittens, eg: https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/

This guys is really amazing. I first saw his naval architecture post and was super impressed https://ciechanow.ski/naval-architecture/

it is also amazing that everything is just hand written javascript https://ciechanow.ski/js/sound.js , using webgl and the browser audio api

...imagine what he could do if someone showed him clojurescript... 🌈

hehe I don't think it makes a difference for this cases, it is a bunch of math and glsl

For the Steven Wittens stuff, I’ve actually got MathBox, the library he used to write those essays, working in Clojurescript. Clojurists Together is funding me to build out that tool, with the goal of making it slightly easier to write essays like these from Clojure / Clojurescript

> For the Steven Wittens stuff, I’ve actually got #mathbox , the library he used to write those essays, working in Clojurescript. Nice! My very first contribution to the clj/s ecosystem, seven years ago, was a https://github.com/cljsjs/packages/tree/master/mathbox for MathBox 1 😄. A friend and I had a short-lived exploratory datavis startup that heavily used MathBox.

(& bringing it full-circle, the startup was enormously inspired by Bret Victor’s work, as well as Hans Rosling’s terrific https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w, which he did 15 years ago and which are https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$bubble$encoding$frame$value=1807;;;;;&chart-type=bubbles&url=v1 — it’s so hard to do high-dimensional datavis well, and that’s the sort of thing we were aiming to do.)

Oh ya, that guy's blog is a masterpiece, the Mechanical Watch one is also insane. The way he makes interactive visualizations for it all is awesome

@U077BEWNQ finally got these docs together and pushed the Mathbox wrapper… https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C06MAR553/p1674683943420799

I’ve got a bunch of the examples ported but Clerk’s markdown processing is broken so my index is shot :)

I've heard it claimed that some people think about things primarily in their own heads, and other people by talking about them (I vaguely recall it being further claimed that this was part of the introvert/extrovert distinction?). No idea how valid that is, but this seems like potentially another aspect of the same thing. I do some of both -- I do a lot of thinking in the small by typing, which is one reason I'm so attached to a REPL-based workflow: I'm constantly asking the REPL questions about the data I'm dealing with, and trying things to confirm that they do what I expect. And then the result of that is actual crystallized code. In the large, eg architectural decisions or questions about how to design a particular algorithm or approach a particular problem, I think away from the computer: sometimes on paper, sometimes just by standing up and staring out a window for a while.

It can depend quite a bit on the problem. If you think of tasks in terms of tactics vs strategy, I can do "tactics" mostly at the keyboard, but I'm much more effective when I do "strategy" mostly away from the keyboard. There's a lot of frameworks and tools that are constraining and don't leave much room for strategy.

some programmers can't type

Having worked with Rich for about a decade, he actually does pretty much solve the problem 99% in his head (or in diagrams/analysis sheets) before he ever writes a line of code. And also I personally cannot do that - I often need to go hack on some code to understand the shape even if I end up just throwing a lot of it away (which I often do). But I have found that I can do 10x more work before I code than I used to, and that’s the essence of the idea.

that is interesting @U064X3EF3, because one could imagine people working like that aren't the people who find interactive repl development that useful

I don’t think the idea of REPL driven development is necessarily antithetical to “hammock time” and clearly thinking through the problem before starting to code. If you have a clear idea in your head, you have a target that you can iterate towards with the help of the REPL’s feedback. I’ve experienced the complimentary roles myself: drawing diagrams is supremely helpful for condensing an idea, and referring to them as I code using the REPL keeps me on track.

Similarly, I’ve gathered information (logs indicating latency, throughput, and other metrics) from REPL based prototypes, plotted them using #C035GRLJEP8, and then used those as empirical data to inform system design considerations during “hammock time,” which is when I can formulate hypotheses about whether a design change will improve one of those metrics that I can then test with the help of the REPL.

I don't say it is antithetical, just that I imagine it is much more useful if your style is to talk a lot to the computer while growing and developing your ideas

Sorry to bring this up again but @U064X3EF3 does Rich just not have to worry about 3rd party/vendor integration at all? Or does he just do it all top-down and leaves those as implementation details? I’m curious if that hammock-driven style only applies to a domain problem in pure-logic-land and if plumbing code on a new API still requires some REPL dabbling?

sure, and then you use a repl