Used it in a production paint program I ported from Ikonas to SGI 4D+ machines.
It worked completely as advertised. I started out just using it to read a settings file. But then I realized that I could use the REPL to change the settings on the fly. After that, I wrote a flexible GUI library, then I was writing core paint functionality in it. It wasn't fast enough for hardcore image processing, although I prototyped a lot of stuff in it before converting to C, but it was dynamite for gluing things together.
My program somehow upended itself, going from a big chunky main loop to lots of little functions in C, glued together with ATLAST. It was almost magical -- I got rid of so much C code and I could add new stuff in minutes instead of hours!
The GUI was a sort of "Tektronix-chic", with flat buttons and LED style numeric readouts. It was completely defined in ATLAST so I could easily change layouts and functions without a recompile.
The "chassis" of zPaint (which included ATLAST) was later used for two commercial products -- zScope (waveform monitor and vectorscope) and zMatte (chromakey with spill suppression). Although it defined the user interfaces for both of those programs, the REPL wasn't exposed to the user (although the zscope manual had a very detailed explanation of how the setup file worked).
Unfortunately, they were both kind of niche products (especially on expensive, niche machines), but I do know zScope was used by Digital Domain in their film scanning pipeline for the "Apollo 13" movie.
Using ATLAST was a very pleasant experience. It integrated very well with ANSI C of that time and it was very compact. The documentation was absolutely stellar and I never had any problems with it that I couldn't solve. It's showing it's age now -- I seem to recall modern compilers frown on some of the memory tricks it does.
Because of that, something like Lua is probably a better choice for new projects, but at the time, it was a huge step forward for me.
I think thats why he charges per month. Its pretty easy to go through an entire seasons worth of videos in under a month. I found $29 for a seasons worth of videos to be worth it. He used to charge per season with no subscription, and before that it was subscription based.
I'm more curious about how frequently he's going to be releasing videos. If its less than 2-3 a week, I'd probably just opt to wait until the season is over.
Agreed which is why I will likely not subscribe. If people are willing to pay that price point then that's fine. $15 per episode for a variable schedule seemed pricey, if you dont care about the immediacy of it it basically turns into $29 once a year where you download the back-catalog and watch at your leisure. In that sense you are paying for the ability to get it as it comes out, not for the content itself.
It's pretty steep, and I'm not sure I'll be keeping the subscription going in a few months time.
Yeah, yeah, "professional development is priceless", "it's less than the cost of a $whatever", herp derp, etc...
But we're staring down an imminent recession and a plummeting Sterling value right now, so every little saving helps, even for well-paid developers and their families.
I have never seen someone successfully guess at how long tasks will take and use that as a method of planning. At some point you are dropping tasks off, or adding them to your day which means you are still working with some prioritization system. Save your calendar for time-critical events/tasks, everything else is a list, hopefully prioritized.
Have you tried using the Cheeseshop lately? I have. It was a painfully slow and wretched experience and I ended up browsing multiple pages to find what I was looking for.
I wonder how much of the $2k decrease could be contributed to geography? I think we are seeing more opportunities for technical jobs throughout the US, lowering the percentage of developers that need to be paid a Silicon Valley wage.
I really wish they would weigh geographic location into their stats. I live in TN where around half that $99k average wage is the norm for CS grads, and that's considered a good salary. Cost of living is much lower here than in Silicon Valley, so it partially evens out. A country-wide average is really no help to anyone with such disparity.
Yes, this could be an instance of Simpson's paradox. If more jobs were created in low paying areas, the salaries could rise in every single geographic area, but still decrease overall.
