First post

Date: 2022-05-03 22:35:45 MEST

Location: Kitchen table.

Input device: Thinkpad x230 in Linux console running Emacs.

Visual: Messy kitchen. Lots of books on top of each other in one corner of the table.

Emotional state: Mixed. Old man shouting at clouds combined with enthusiasm.

Physical state: Poor. Diverse ailments of an old man.

I've been hearing a lot of good things about the Gemini community so I thought I'd jump in and test it out a bit.

Read quite a lot of phlog and gemlog posts. There's so much to read! I like the often very personal tone some people have, so I thought I'd do the same with these posts. I'll probably keep the ordinary blog for something else.

Haven't quite found the tooling I need for following feeds and stuff yet but I'll get there.

Modula-2

Lately I've been experimenting with Modula-2. It seems like an old forgotten gem. Years ago I tried the Turbo Modula-2 (yes!) on CP/M. That was a nice experience. This time, though, I wanted something to run on my ordinary computers. I tried GNU Modula-2.

The ordinary gm2 package on Debian Sid is broken so I can't even compile a program without statements. The gm2-9 works but has a missing dependency on libpth-dev but that was easy to figure out. After that it was smooth sailing.

I know some people don't like the ISO version of M2 but GM2's most useful libraries are in the ISO flavour so I mostly used that. GM2 doesn't support the optional object-oriented and generic extensions of ISO, though.

Been reading up on the R10 dialect of the language as well. It seems like a sort of revival going on what with the R10 dialect and GNU Modula-2 being merged in the GCC main. I like it!

Work

I'm currently on loan to a new department. We're recruiting for this new thing so I can go back to researchy shenanigans, but meanwhile I'm doing stuff that almost touches production or will be.

Work has mostly been fighting against CI for a pretty advanced integration test lately, so I need the Modula-2 thing to keep me interested in computers at all.

On Thursday I'll go on one of my monthly (ish) visits to HQ in Gothenburg. Unfortunately my train leaves rather early in the morning but otherwise the Gothenburg trips are usually fun.

Until next time,

MC.