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  • 10 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • setsubyou@lemmy.worldtoProgramming@programming.dev•Introduction - redo: a recursive build system
    2·
    9 days ago

    I’m not sure about this… the build systems I work with are either so complex that something like cmake gets used because that way we can support multiple build systems on different platforms without maintaining five different projects, or they are so simple that it frankly doesn’t matter whether it’s make or something else.

    And in the former case, i.e. the only case where I even care what tool we use, what I care about the most is speed, so I would want something like ninja instead of make (which cmake conveniently supports). I don’t want to micro-optimize by doing everything myself with redo.

  • setsubyou@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Remember when flip phones came with a second battery that you can swap in when the first one dies?
    5·
    1 month ago

    I had one of those laptops (a PowerBook). Yes, it had two slots that could be used for batteries. But that meant taking out the CD drive. Modern laptops don’t have that anymore so I’m not sure where the room for another battery would come from. The other thing is, it lasted at best 4-5 hours on one battery when doing light work. Its modern counterparts last 10-15 hours on one battery.

    The same thing actually happened with phones. But now we literally can’t spend half a minute not looking at them and we also play energy hungry games on them etc. You can still get a phone with replaceable battery though, e.g. Fairphone or Volla.

  • setsubyou@lemmy.worldtoProgramming@programming.dev•Going old-school: I'm reading "How to Design Programs" by MIT Press, and using LISP variation
    71·
    2 months ago

    IMHO, LISP is ok for theoretical fundamentals but it won’t necessarily get you a practical understanding of how computers work. Functional languages are more like how mathematicians wish computers worked. All programming languages are abstractions, but functional languages abstract away how the underlying hardware works in ways that procedural languages don’t.

    And Java is pretty useful if you want to get a job but if you don’t want that, then there are less painful options. The difference to Python is mostly that Java often feels like it was intentionally made annoying to use. But it’s a pretty high level language, I wouldn’t call it more fundamental or basic than Python. Java wins on performance but that has nothing to do with how high level it is.

    For practical fundamentals, if you actually want those, I’d recommend starting with microcontrollers and their assembly. Modern CPUs are so complex that learning fundamentals from scratch with assembly is quite difficult. But with smaller/older microcontrollers (like PIC or something) it’s both more approachable and more useful. It’s almost a shame that hobbyist microcontroller platforms are pretty advanced now too. But you can move on to C first, you can ignore MicroPython for a while if you want.

    If you want a game way to learn absolute basics, there is a game called Turing Complete. It basically teaches you how to build your own CPU architecture from logic gates. You start with the basics about logic circuits and eventually build a simple CPU, and then another more complex one. I think this actually goes a bit too far in terms of fundamentals, it will take you forever to learn how to even make something write Hello World on a screen. But I guess this is the closest to how I started out. Of course for me the logic part was theory only. And the CPU I eventually learned programming first was a 6502 and not something I designed myself.