I hate them. On my TV, in my Car, my Phone – everywhere. Often leaving the user completely clueless as to what they actually do.

But, it seems, they’re not going to go away any time soon. Evilness – that’s all they are – For illiterate morons who can’t read.

alt+f2 and type application (my favorite launcher is katapult and the keys for that are alt+space)
and in general, hotkeys it up… win+w is web browser, win+f is file manager, win+e is text editor, and win+d is doom3 (always a pleasure to accidentally open it between the two and get side tracked for an hour :)”

That is nowhere near as efficient and easy as it could be. There is a much better way, but I will reveal all soon…

I’m just amazed nobody has thought of it already – it shows how unable to think outside the box the entire world of computer users is…

Using folders for your music is a GOOD idea, unless you’re one of the masses of idiots who pretends to ‘like’ music, and has to pretend to ‘want’ to listen to ‘rock’ today, or ‘jazz’ tomorrow, thus needing iTunes and its bloody irritating ‘filing’ system to find them what they pretend to ‘want’ to listen to.

I know where every single song in my 4,000 track MP3 collection is, all filed in folders, either by artist, or about 10% in ‘genre’ folders, such as ’80s’, ‘Love’, ‘Dance’, etc. I don’t want a long list of 4,000 tracks, thank you, that’s for idiots.

Your ‘long list’ idea doesn’t work when you are dealing with thousands of files. I remember the position of some of the 4,000 songs SPATIALLY, i.e. I know it’s in the first, top level folder,
A-F
not in
G-M
or whatever, and then within
A-F
it’s within
Dance
etc.

Your ‘huge list’ idea is stupid. Microsoft’s ‘Ribbon’ is equally stupid.

Spatial memory is where it’s at. I will reveal all very soon…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggoTQqNXOQs

foo a b
_ _ _ _ bar c d (moo) e f g
_ _ _ _ …h i j k l

I hope this makes sense now…

My suggestion (may look less weird than starting a new line with a comma)
…for your interesting Pythonic LISP.

Just creating a freeware game with your new language as a proof of concept may be sufficient to convince others of its utility. You would at least attract potential “modders” who would be prepared to learn your language in order to script new AI behaviours, etc.

I say this because I have been working on an entirely new language for very many years, struggling to find the exact ingredients to “bake the perfect cake”. My fear being that I will need some feature or programming paradigm in the future and curse the tools at my disposal for not supporting those semantics – something that would be made all the more infuriating by having the knowledge that I was in the ideal position to avoid all of these problems if I had only anticipated them in the design at the outset. That said, I also wanted to keep my language “small” in the sense that it could be described by a thin manual as I felt that there were many ‘full featured’ languages out there already that just seemed to have musty annexes that one didn’t come into regular enough contact with to retain a degree of mastery and which, as a result, forced you back into reading a huge reference manual.

I don’t want to sound negative as I quite understand the desire to tell people who may be “in a position to understand what you are on about” what you have been able to achieve. I know no one who I can talk about the specific details of what I have been working on and have, eventually, come to accept this. In fact, if I were to find that someone wanted to really know I wouldn’t tell them because I would not want them to steal my ideas and implement something similar to my work long before I got around to doing it (as I am quite a slow worker). I also want my ideas to be taken as a package, rather than “cherry-picked” as it is how they all fit together that makes it significant.

Anyway, best of luck with Animus. I can say that designing a language makes for an extremely diverting intellectual pursuit – even if there is no money at the end of it…

I don’t think you understand the idea. C is static and native compiled too, of course, but an in-memory representation of C code in Lisp can be compiled out to object code. The Lisp layer becomes just syntax and a build system, effectively.

Languages with their own runtime are a bit trickier. If you wanted, say, to write Python in Animus but target CPython, Animus somehow has to get its hooks into running and managing CPython. Or say you’re writing Javascript in Animus but targeting the browser: there’s no way to do it, really, except to generate actual Javascript source (like GWT, I suppose). In any of these scenarios, you’re bridging over “legacy” layers, which is never ideal. The idea, though, is that we would eventually ditch these intermediate layers. But in the mean time, I admit, things would be a bit messy.