Zompist Bboard Again

Can anyone recommend some book blogs or forums that focus on... to put it bluntly, smart people books? It's easy to find genre fiction circles where people talk about the latest mouth-breathing YA paranormal romance or whatever, but intelligent conversation about literary fiction is harder and harder to come by. I used to read Salmoneous' blog, but he seems to have mostly abandoned it. I would love any recommendations you all can give me.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Tue Aug 17, 2021 10:29 pm I used to read Salmoneous' blog, but he seems to have mostly abandoned it.

He recently put up a review of Tikhiy Don, have you already seen that?

hwhatting wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 2:37 am

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Tue Aug 17, 2021 10:29 pm I used to read Salmoneous' blog, but he seems to have mostly abandoned it.

He recently put up a review of Tikhiy Don, have you already seen that?

I knew somebody was going to mention that. Yes, I have seen it, but thank you anyway. I think he's down to about one post per year, so I stand by my evaluation of "mostly abandoned." I'm hoping there are others like his blog somewhere that are still being actively maintained. Or better yet, a forum or facebook group or something more interactive.

Well then, what are some more modern analogs of C that I should consider?

malloc wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 8:30 am Well then, what are some more modern analogs of C that I should consider?

The thing is, C is not a particularly complex language, so there aren’t too many modern languages designed as analogs of C specifically (as opposed to C++). The main one I’ve heard of is Zig, but even that one’s pretty obscure. If you want to learn a modern lower-level language, I’d definitely recommend Rust.

malloc wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 8:30 am Well then, what are some more modern analogs of C that I should consider?

If you are looking for a language with the advantages of C++ combined with the advantages of a modern high level language, I would recommend Rust. About modern languages like C, though, there are few languages like that today, because C has firmly cemented itself in the niche of "portable assembly language". I must insert a shameless plug for Forth, though, which is like if assembly language and Lisp had a child. (It isn't quite as fast as C, and it certainly is not a "safe" language unlike Rust, but it is extremely flexible and can be very lightweight if you pick the right implementation - my own Forth implementation, zeptoforth, is not "lightweight" by embedded standards by any means (a "big" build can be as big as 256K, and a "full" build is up to 128K, even though the kernel is < 32K, which is okay for the particular microcontrollers it targets, but is very large by MCU standards), but some of them can be significantly smaller, such as Mecrisp-Stellaris (which weighs in at 20K) and STM32eForth (which weighs in at 8K!!!.)

just dropping in to say hello and that I still read the board from time to time, just been busy lately, but I tend to be active on twitter

keep safe

Well, hello.

Welcome back masako!

Hi masako!

Hello there! Keep safe too.

malloc wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 8:30 am Well then, what are some more modern analogs of C that I should consider?

It depends what you want to use it/them for. One thing's for sure, though; you'll never need to use malloc()

Well then, this really stinks. I quite liked the C programming language, enough even to base my username on it.

You can still like it.

All in all, C is a decent low-level language if one does not want to program in assembly and one does not want to embrace one's inner stack (i.e. program in Forth). This is probably why it is so few languages competing with it - C already fits its particular niche well, so there is little motivation to create competing languages.

I've just watched this YouTube video about Vulgar Latin, made by an American. Every time he says "Latin" he makes an effort to fully pronounce the /t/, where Americans usually pronounce it something like /læʔn/ as far as I can tell. I don't know why, but it sounds very creepy and disconcerting.

I've encountered what sounds like an "overpronounced" t ("button" having something like [tʰ~t], where I would normally have [d]; my Latin "t" is glottalised) sometimes in speakers from areas of the southwestern United States (notably among Mormons), so maybe it's a case of a few dialects not leniting or glottalising the "t"?

Jonlang wrote: ↑Fri Aug 27, 2021 10:57 am I've just watched this YouTube video about Vulgar Latin, made by an American. Every time he says "Latin" he makes an effort to fully pronounce the /t/, where Americans usually pronounce it something like /læʔn/ as far as I can tell. I don't know why, but it sounds very creepy and disconcerting.

some people do that in that word. I don't know why. maybe prescriptivism

i noticed some years back that the word autism is also prone to this, and some people said it was due to association with the related word autistic, but that theory wouldnt explain why it happens to this word too.

Pabappa wrote: ↑Fri Aug 27, 2021 7:20 pm i noticed some years back that the word autism is also prone to this, and some people said it was due to association with the related word autistic, but that theory wouldnt explain why it happens to this word too.

I pronounce autism with a clear secondary stress on the second syllable, hence why I pronounce it with [tʰ] consistently. Note that it is common for -ism words to receive secondary stress on the first syllable of -ism; this is the case for me for communism, socialism, anarchism, fascism, racism, sexism, and so on.