From an end-user perspective, the TTY system in Linux (or any POSIX-like OS) is both functional and intuitive. For example, the input you type in usually goes to the process you expect it to go to, CTRL+Z usually suspends the process you expect to see suspended, CTRL+C usually interrupts the process you expect to see interrupted, and so on.

If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean?

Programming today exercises our symbolic reasoning. We write code—a sequence of symbols—in a text editor.

But when we explain ideas to colleagues, we don’t just speak words, we draw diagrams and gesture with our hands. We augment the symbolic channel with a spatial channel.

How can we communicate programs to a computer over a spatial channel?

Shadershop is an interface for programming GPU shaders in the mode of a direct manipulation image editor like Photoshop. It is an experiment in leveraging the programmer’s spatial reasoning the way that coding today leverages the programmer’s symbolic reasoning.

Back in the day, I was reading a book about UNIX® programming and have learned how to write a signal handler. It was a long time ago and I don’t remember the book, but to this day the way described in that book is something that shows up in Google’s top results when you search for “How to write a signal handler”. Here it is — a simple, elegant solution to the world’s toughest problem: