Göktuğ Kayaalp @cadadr@mastodon.sdf.org

"What is programming anyways?" is an attempt at an introductory text that aims to familiarise the complete n00b with programming.

Initially, I wrote this as part of a presentation to introduce my colleagues from the Linguistics MA course to programming w/ Python, but that plan was postponed, so I made that part into a blog post.

The aim is to show that it's just a simple stack of abstractions.

If you read it, please reply with criticism ∨ suggestions for improvements.

https://www.gkayaalp.com/blog/20200123_what_is_prog.html

Wow, 16 points clear, with one game less than City? #Liverpool look like they gonna do it this time.

Turns out I can't suffice with ~15Gb-20Gb of data. With my last bill incurring more than TRY120 from my exceeding my data plan, I decided to call my quest to only use mobile data a fail after four months of paying lots of extra money to Vodafone, and to get home internet.

Interestingly, with mobile data, anything over 20Gb costs so much more. I can get 25 for TRY109, but 50Gb is TRY299. That's ~2x+70. Why?

Eskişehir is beautiful!!

In the last 2 years, transformational generative syntax has been my nightmare. Whatever I did, I failed to understand it, & came to the conclusion that it's no good as a theory of language. Turns out it was the material and the teachers that fail at delivering it. I still think it is outdated and needs a successor (I'm partial to CxG, but haven't read all that much about it yet), but at least, using Syntactic Structures Revisited by Lasnik, I'm able to actually get what Chomsky is trying to do.

So, I'm reading (very slowly, truly veeerryy slowly) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

The too-positive hype around the book was kinda off-putting, which is why I avoided it for a while, but now that I'm reading it, I'm really enjoying it, and kinda sad that I didn't read it before, back when I had more time.

It's like, they're trying to gaslight people into feeling unable to do everyday normal stuff by themselves.

And it's not like they're offering anything useful to differently abled people. You probably use MS Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice Writer, the spellchecker is in the menu (and Word's one seems to be rather sophisticated). Or, free or very cheap word games and other puzzles are easily available.

It's "Thing-already-on-your-computer-or-desk-as-a-Service".

My favourite ads by far are the Grammarly one and Elevate ad.

Grammarly: I'm way too dumb to type and/or turn on spellchecker in Word, yet I somehow became a famous author or a university professor. I thus happily pay Grammarly to do what I can have for free.

Elevate: I used to know like fifty words in total, thanks to Elevate I can get basic human tasks done, like talking to my colleagues.

The pattern is interesting: almost as if they're trying to say "you're an idiot without us".

Youtube algorithm: "Lem'me show him this ad for the five hundredth time. It's not like their boss care if their marketing department pays us for nothing in return with the sweet money investors pump into the company."

IDK how many years have gone by since I've seen a theatre play, but I just bought a ticket for one. Two? Three?

In that time ticket prices have skyrocketed, like the price of everything else in Turkey.

Sadly, in these days, whatever you do, you end up talking on the price of it. Inflation is killing us...

On the bright side of things, I've missed theatre and cinema, and luckily I'll find time to pick that habit up again. Master's has crashed into me hard, but I'm learning to deal with it.

I have to "rebase" my config onto a "modern" GNU/Linux system. My current main setup, with i3wm and scripts, creates some sort of a barrier between me and the world around me. Things like giving presentations are unnecessarily difficult.

I basically need to move onto something like Xubuntu, axe many configs and scripts, & have my config be less heavy.

MX Linux didn't work for me. Wonder anybody has any non-Debian-based suggestion that is not Fedora (eww) yet has a rich pkg ecosystem.

The mess that is syntax: theories are so numerous and confused that going past learning theory onto actually applying it or simply understanding your theoretical tools is a daunting task. My gut feeling is that the first step to solution is to just chuck away the transformational generative theories b/c they are so much more prone to steering away from phenomena and getting lost in a garden path of meta yak shaving.

Aaand yeah! Because I synced addons with another Firefox, fucking thing axed my addons configurations on my normal profile too. All my settings for uBlock Origin, my GM scripts, my userstyles, my redirects, all gone...

I can't take this bullshit anymore. I'm jumping browsers ASAP.