If this intersection is of interest to you, so might Mason Currey's book Daily Rituals ("On the routines and working habits of 161 inspired minds, from Beethoven to Donald Barthelme, Kafka to Georgia O’Keeffe") which I've enjoyed very much (no affiliation), for similar reasons.

Link: https://www.masoncurrey.com/daily-rituals

This looks intriguing and I'm definitely going to try it out. The clincher? Seeing the possibly gratuitous but ultimately wonderful use of ed in pane 0 in the screenshot.

I went a little too far into 'unix as my IDE'.

Do I regret using `ed` as my primary editor? No.

Do I still use `ed` as my primary editor? Absolutely not.

Now that is a good typo

could be on purpose

Was that really necessary? The title of the item, to which the above reply was written, was "Solving Advent of Code with jq". So yes, "doing the same thing" here fits fine.

(Author of post here) Imposing constraints upon oneself is not a bad thing at all, I enjoy that approach (which was also why this time I constrained myself to `jq`). I didn't know that `column` could do so much, thanks for the pointer, btw.

There's a lot of references here to jq being 'arcane'. For me, one of the challenges in improving my jq fu has been to find examples of larger programs, from which to learn.

One thing that seems to be perhaps a misconception amongst some is that jq invocations are short and only 'one-liners', and that a 'real script' (in a 'real language') would be better in many cases. I think this lack of larger program examples probably helps to perpetuate this misunderstanding too.

Anyway, I was inspired enough by the article in question to write up some of my own thoughts on jq and statelessness: https://qmacro.org/blog/posts/2022/05/02/some-thoughts-on-jq...

Wow, I've been on the lookout for larger jq programs from which to learn. I'm going to enjoy learning from wsjq, thank you!

(author here) - the subcommands are great but don't give me what I was looking for (as explained in the detail of the post).

Now you point that out, yes - it's true. I remember working through various BASIC PLUS programs that we were creating, a few lines at a time, and, yes, together. On the Superterm terminal there was an exciting element of danger as you might get your finger swiped by the print head as you pointed to a piece of code that needed refactoring :-)

(Author of post here) - thank you for these insights and history!

Yes very interesting back in the mid 70's we had access to a PDP at my comprehensive School in Bedfordshire.

Though we didn't have the luxury of a terminal in the school - we sent our work of on coding sheets and got the results back for the next lesson.

We used CECIL (an assembly language designed for education) and in the second year BASIC.

This was the CSE stream BTW aka the stream for those expected to leave school at 16