Hermeto Pascoal is a fantastic Brazilian musician and composer. Maybe this Youtube video will serve as an introduction for English speakers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=461qtZqpOtc

(I have no affiliation with the above channel)

I've only discovered him a couple days ago while browsing youtube. I stumbled upon his "musica da lagoa" [0] video, and watching just this video was enough to see his passion for music and talent. The guy is genius.

[0] - https://youtu.be/lZbfNtDCHdM

I found this on the Emacs Wiki [1]. It seems to work:

    (defun sort-symbols (reverse beg end)
      "Sort symbols in region alphabetically, in REVERSE if negative.
    See `sort-words'."
      (interactive "*P\nr")
      (sort-regexp-fields reverse "\\(\\sw\\|\\s_\\)+" "\\&" beg end))

[1]: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SortWords

Since we are celebrating 30 years of FreeBSD, I thought some people would be interested in this highly entertaining talk by Kirk McKusick.

Maybe that's the book? (by Jim Carlton):

https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Jim-Carlton/dp/0887309658

Link to the manual as it has more information: https://spwhitton.name/doc/consfigurator/

I'm very excited about this direction (I'm no JavaScript expert, but I didn't like the huge node_modules directory). I think this is noteworthy:

"We've been running a version of HEY on this stack for a few weeks, and it's a peach (full report and rollout coming soon!). No separate watch process needed for builds, no wrestling with configs, instant reloads, none of the node tooling needed at all, with no overall loss of performance or capability. It's the best of all worlds – for us at Basecamp."

HN discussion from 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8284835

I didn't know much about it, so I googled a little bit:

Robert Strandh is also the author of McCLIM, the free implementation of the Common Lisp Interface Manager. [1]

I found this to be interesting: "So, one example that appears to baffle people is that SICL LOOP uses LOOP for its implementation. But there is no contradiction here, because the LOOP macroexpander runs at, well, macroexpansion time, which will happen in the host Common Lisp system during bootstrapping. After that, there is no trace of the LOOP macro." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8285747

[2] https://cliki.net/SICL

It's an interesting presentation by Jan Krutisch at the 2019 European Ruby conference. He shows how to generate electronic music with pure Ruby.

There's a related web site [1] and all code is on GitHub [2]:

  - https://ruby-synth.fun
  - https://github.com/halfbyte/rubysynth

You can use different ways to enter pitch [0]. A common way is to use the "octave.pitch" format, such as 08.04, where 08 is the central octave (if I remember correctly) and 04 is the note E. It's common to use a score generator such as PythonScore [1, 2], and some people (myself included) like to use a regular programming language to generate the scores. I've used Common Lisp, Tcl, and Python in the past. Csound has a few frontends [3] that people may like. AFAIK, Csound can read notes from a MIDI keyboard as well.

[0] http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/PitchTop.html

[1] http://jacobjoaquin.github.io/csd/pysco.html

[2] http://write.flossmanuals.net/csound/methods-of-writing-csou...

[3] https://csound.com/frontends.html

EDIT: remove some repetition

I didn't know about:

    {A..C}{0..3}

"This sequence creates every combination of A to C and 0 to 3—i.e. A0, A1, A2, A3, B0, B1, etc."

And:

    echo {a..z..2}
    a c e g i k m o q s u w y

"The ..2 bit tells the expansion to only output every second letter."