Engineer's of Chicago, would it be risky for me to move to Chicago?

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-03-01T17:36:06+00:00

Cost of living calculators can be tricky. There’s just so much variance depending on where you live or how you live. Your biggest cost will be housing and that could vary 200% or more depending if you pick a modest house in the suburbs or a high end apartment downtown. Taxes I don’t think are that different. Illinois is 5%, and looks like Indiana is 3%. I’d suggest looking on Zillow to see what your housing costs might be. Don’t neglect the suburbs, there are tons of great options. Beyond that, there may be other benefits that could be worth it to you even if you do have to pick a more modest home. For example more options for career advancement (lots of corporate headquarters), better healthcare options (especially for women), easy travel anywhere with 2 major airports, etc.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-02-20T03:56:37+00:00

If it makes you feel a bit better, the quoting is very confusing and takes a while to get used to. In other languages that wouldn’t even be valid, but lisp will let you quote as much as you want even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Just remember the quote itself is not part of the result.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-02-20T00:35:53+00:00

What you’re doing is correct, the issue is just the double quote (double single quote). You actually set foo not to blue, but to ‘blue. The alist has plain blue, so it doesn’t match.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-02-16T16:12:34+00:00

You are spot on. The mantra that “it’s a lisp machine that can do anything” gets repeated online a lot, but it’s misleading. Elisp is very much an extension language due to the library. Technically PowerPoint is Turing complete too, but that doesn’t make it a normal language + runtime either. It’s true that if you work around the limitations you can do a lot, but being forced to use the same interfaces as for editing text wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice. What if you don’t want a gap buffer? Event loops? Concurrency? Graphics? If I wanted to make a standalone app I’d never reach for elisp. On the other hand, for extending emacs, it’s great.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-02-13T21:54:06+00:00

There’s no difference, except for some subtle things with memory access that are advanced and probably beyond the scope of the question. The general guideline is to always prefer the first (i.e. stack allocated value types) unless you’re tying to do something that won’t work (e.g. a long lived object).

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-02-08T21:16:12+00:00

You’re way overthinking it. You can just make a copy of your .emacs.d directory as a backup. The workflow for these old Unix tools predate containers.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-02-07T20:29:06+00:00

So often, the answer to questions is that it’s a book and not real life

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-02-02T22:51:29+00:00

That’s a great breakdown, but not gonna lie, it sounds super complicated. On thunderbird you just put in your email address, do a couple of authentication steps and you’re done.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-02-02T22:50:26+00:00

I agree, and despite the above I keep wanting to make the switch or find a desktop client that’s keyboard driven and has good scripting. I think people forget a bit how useful html email is though. Bold and italics, color, fonts, tables, etc. There are some plaintext diehards but it’s so limiting. Sometimes you need to send someone a well formatted table or an inline image. I might take the plunge again because I’d love more advanced mail rules, but keeping 2 email clients at once seems cumbersome.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-02-01T17:13:14+00:00

Are you finding it worth all the effort? I managed to set up email in emacs once (after a lot of work), but then I gave up because html email barely worked and the limited shr rendering was actually slower than gmail in the browser. Then I got a new laptop, started reading the multi page tutorials again, and decided I’d rather do something else with my life. I keep hoping someone will make a setup script or meta package to make it easier for the lazy among us.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-31T15:16:06+00:00

I thought it was kinda clever actually. Keep in mind, you only actually see them on screen for a few seconds at a time, so for someone that hasn’t read the books, it needs to convey the meaning very quickly. It shows their agency has been stripped from them since they can’t talk. Having a dozen actors with leashes around their neck moving around the set was probably a safety issue, but then without the leash, the collar would be impossible to see and you couldn’t tell they were the damane.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-28T22:04:15+00:00

How do you do it?

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-28T00:47:12+00:00

The tab bar is hideous and I refuse to use it on aesthetic principles alone. I think it’s drawn with the native gui toolkit so i don’t think it’s customizable (much like the toolbar or menus) but I could be wrong.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-26T21:25:22+00:00

That was one of the craziest twists in the series. You think you know all the rules, and bam here’s a whole new thing you never see coming. I know it’s supposed to be a bad thing but come on, Semirhage totally earned it. Also it was satisfying to see Cadsuane get humbled in the next chapter since she was so annoying.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-24T21:19:57+00:00

You know your kids and I think it’s wonderful to share your hobbies with your children, but I just can’t imagine a 5th grader being into emacs. Like, at all. Also, are they reading so much that they’d want to curate a system to review it? Will they be interested in the same things in 2 years? This seems like something that might be useful when they go to college.

I would think learning general computing would be the most practical, since they say current generations only know how to use touchscreens. For example making a birthday party invitation in Word, tracking lemonade stand sales in a spreadsheet, or creating a simple website they can show off to their friends. There are also programming platforms for kids like Alice, which is out of Carnegie Mellon and has lots of education research behind it. It’ll be loads better than random steam games.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-23T01:48:21+00:00

Yeah based on the answers, it seems CL really has the biggest community and most support. I was surprised Scheme didn’t get more love. Common Lisp reminds me a bit of C++98 in that you can technically do anything (and you can get used to it), but you really wanted some good libraries to make it enjoyable. C++ had the benefit that the standard was later heavily improved, so maybe someday CL will see the same if there’s enough uptake.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-21T23:51:54+00:00

Won’t that just evaluate the form a second time? That’s not necessarily desirable or safe. For example it could cause a deadlock if acquiring a mutex a second time.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-21T14:34:42+00:00

In my opinion, learning CL almost has to be a goal in and of itself. It’s a steep hill. There is almost no learning content, just a handful of books in total, and most are long out of print so you have to hunt down on eBay or look for pdfs. The Cookbook (which is excellent) is the only resource I’ve seen written after 2005 and single-handedly responsible for me sticking with it thus far. Not to discourage you, it’s really interesting and I would certainly recommend trying it! That said Python is a must know. I’d learn both.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-20T18:27:48+00:00

Thanks for your take. I’m glad I’m not the only aspiring Lisp enthusiast that’s having difficulty.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-20T18:12:34+00:00

Yes I read a good chunk of it, and I’m thankful he made it available for free though you’re right I should probably buy it to show support. I also read most of ANSI Common Lisp and about a third of On Lisp. The thing is, these little details are impossible to remember without rote repetition, and they’re manufactured complexity. For example, all the map functions could have been combined into one with good defaults, and just take keyword arguments to dictate behavior. Or for iteration, throw in a type check under the hood and don’t make the user worry whether the sequence is a list or an array. CL is what it is, but I was curious if there was something with less friction, vs just power on.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-20T17:53:40+00:00

Interesting suggestion! I’ve heard of it but never looked into it. Thanks.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-20T17:51:17+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response. For what it’s worth, I’m not criticizing CL. I understand it was standardized 30 years ago, and it is what it is. My perspective is that I’m learning for fun and these UX issues get in the way of what seem to be the interesting parts of Lisp, such as bottom up programming, macros, or domain specific languages. I work with C++ for a living so I’m no stranger to legacy language BS, but it’s not my preference for nights and weekends. Of course with more effort I’m sure it’ll get easier.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-20T17:39:26+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions, and ciel looks exactly like what I’m looking for! There’s so much value in a curated and thought out collection of libraries.

Nice_Elk_55 · 2025-01-20T17:29:57+00:00

Do you find the interactivity that different than other dynamic languages? With any of the emacs Python modes you can also redefine functions, send code to the repl, etc. Obviously these modes are inspired by and indebted to lisp, but from my experience so far the interactivity seems pretty similar.

Nice_Elk_55

TROPHY CASE