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Are you Saruman by any chance?

This is a really cool Emacs package (not mine) I found recently. Its purpose is to create links to objects (files and commits) on sites like GitLab, Savannah, Bitbucket, GitHub etc. (I wrote a blog post about it, too, with a little extension, though I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share it here so I won't.)


I've been working with a codebase for a very specific domain where hardly anyone even knew the English terms for the domain-specific things (and some of them probably didn't even exist - highly localized customs etc.). No point in using English then.


I'm not (yet) in my 50s (though close). I used to have a C64 back in the day. I wrote write a few things in its horrible BASIC dialect. Probably the most advanced was a database (not relational, just one table, but kept separately from the source, of course on an audio cassette).

That device had ridiculous capabilities. The sound chip was good enough people wrote a speech synthesis software. Later, people wrote a graphical OS, with e.g. a text editor being an equivalent of Windows Write from the 90s.


My guess would be that the broadcaster had one geek who pushed for that. Fellow geeks had software over the radio, the broadcaster had an opinion of a modern one, keeping up with the newest tech. Win-win.


My wife is non-technical and doesn't know anything about bookkeeping. Every-ish day I ask her for receipts and enter them into our ledger-cli file. She mostly uses her debit card, so it's usually easy not to miss too much. (I use cash exclusively, so it's more of a conscious effort for me.) Every month I send her a monthly report via email.


I created a little app that tracks the cash spending that I can export with a CSV file. You can host it yourself. I had no idea that my wife was using so much cash!

https://github.com/jon49/cash


Thanks, that looks very neat! I love apps like this, situated software created to scratch someone's itch.


Are you me, by any chance? I had been doing exactly this for years. Finally, my income rose enough that I stopped to care - I just pay from my current account and move on. But what astonishes me is that hardly anyone seems to do that, especially people earning less than the current me. It seems such an obvious idea!

I think that lack of sound financial education is the real problem here. Of course, it's country-dependent, but I doubt it's done really well in a lot of places. I have a slightly conspiracy-ish theory explaining why good financial education is not a part of primary school curriculum...


I suppose one problem with this is that accounting needs legal responsibility in case of mistakes. Software usually (if not always) does not guarantee anything (in the legal sense) and its seller/producer does not assume any responsibility whatsoever.


Besides being a mathematician and a programmer, I have a degree in finance and banking, so I learned double-entry accounting pretty early. As a mathematician, I appreciate the beauty of this very clever, very general and very abstract system. As a geek, I've been using ledger-cli with Emacs for a decade now, and Gnucash earlier.

Re: learning curve, it's not that difficult. Shameless plug: I wrote a textbook (actually, a textbooklet, if that is a word;-)) about the basics of DEA, focused on personal finance and using ledger-cli: https://leanpub.com/personal-accounting-in-ledger/


JarJarScript.


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