I used a New+Unlocked+Pixel+X on eBay to find a rough price of the phone.
Most people get scammed by their carrier and pay $25-45 per month just for their wireless subscription, and many more get caught up in the device bundles which gets you the "latest and greatest", at a huge price. So people are paying, per month, what you can pay, per year for a Pixel.
You can use Silent Link to pay by the gigabyte with no expiration date. Most people don't need unlimited—I use a maximum of 5 GB per month, and my average is around 3. At $1.60 per month, that is $60 per YEAR for me.
Swap in https://jmp.chat for another 60 dollars per year for calls/texts and you get a $120/year phone bill which is just $10/month.
I will be moving from US Mobile to Jmp.chat once my plan expires.
You could also use US Mobile for $17/month which is unlimited and is user friendly. They also often have Pixels for a significant discount with no lock-in.
eBay International exists and I've shipped my laptops from the US to Bolivia, Guam, Sweden, and before the war, Russia. You can definitely get a Pixel unless maybe you live in the DRC or the PRK
A Pixel 9a is ~350 Euro here in Europe and it still has better device security (separate secure enclave, MTE, etc.) than pretty much any other phone besides iPhone and other Pixels. Pretty great cameras for the price too. Still supported until 2032 (so presumably also on GrapheneOS).
I get you. I used to buy Nexus devices as well as some of the first Pixels, until at some point the prices shot up to ridiculous levels for a phone and I went with other brands.
Last year though the Pixel 8a was selling for 350€ and I got one. Luckily, given the recent developments. Will be installing GrapheneOS.
I bought an 8a new when it launched for the express purpose of installing GOS. It cost like $450, and will last me most of a decade. If you are using a phone that costs significantly less than that (and I am speaking from personal experience! I had an Obamaphone that I got at a foodbank for many years, as well as a number of crappy used Androids!) your phone storage is so limiting that you are struggling to install more than a few apps.
> If you are using a phone that costs significantly less than that (and I am speaking from personal experience! I had an Obamaphone that I got at a foodbank for many years, as well as a number of crappy used Androids!) your phone storage is so limiting that you are struggling to install more than a few apps.
The only phone I've ever had trouble installing more than a few apps was one with 512MB of storage. If I go check the second result on amazon for android phone it's a solid motorola option, unlocked for $127 and with 128GB. That's more than enough; even some flagships have 128GB.
The "just over $100" range has multiple options with good storage. Below that is a sea of locked/refurbished phones that are also good options in many cases.
Digging deeper I eventually hit a "BLU" brand phone for $50 with only 16GB, and that leaves you with not very much after the OS takes its space. But then you can add $10 to get another 16GB and have more than enough room for apps.
So you have to go really low to have the problem you're describing.
I'm used to fixed partition sizes. The OS eating into user space sounds pretty ugly. And updates to builtin apps since the last OS update eat space, but only so much.
Regardless, since they have a 16GB model I strongly doubt the 32GB model would ever have less than 16GB of usable space.
I've bought Motorola phones that cost less than half of that and still last for 3-5 years and I've been able to install far more than "a few" apps. Having an SD card slot is great for offloading the big storage uses like photos/video.
I'm talking about beginners, not seasoned Lisp hands, most of whom—until the great boomer dieoff occurs at least—are already comfortable in Emacs. If you're still just finding your feet in Lisp, you're not aware enough of its tremendous power to miss it from your IDE. You're just wondering why you have to Escape Meta Alt Control Shift to get anything done instead of, you know, just using the menu and mouse commands and keyboard shortcuts that literally everyone else uses.
You can always start the REPL on its own and start playing that way.
Or use something like:
sbcl --load <filename>
Sly/Slime is not essential to play around with Lisp. Emacs just has the right architecture for an REPL workflow. You can do REPL development with Sql and various other programs in Emacs.
Something like SLIME isn't essential to execute Lisp code, you're right, but it is essential in order to understand the efficiencies afforded by interactive development, which may as well be one of the pillars of the language, since "garbage collection" and "an object system" aren't in and of themselves differentiators anymore*. Using something like SLIME also takes a lot of the pains that people have with Lisp away, namely balancing parens and indenting code correctly. People who do the "I'll use my own editor" approach to beginning Lisp usually write things that look like:
(defun myfun(x)
(let (x)
(setq x 5)
(when (eq x 6)
(print "6")
)
)
)
Which is absolutely not what Lisp code should look like. Emacs-and-kin don't outright stop that, but the defaults are such that it's less likely.
____
* Of course, technically, CLOS is something to behold. But you won't sell someone on Lisp because it can do "OOP".
Interactive development is because Common Lisp runntime has the concept of images and systems. Just like you start you OS and do things with it, you start the Lisp runtime and do things with it. It’s a point A to point B type of interaction like running a script. Smalltalk, SMl, a modern web browser,… has the same kind of interaction. It’s not dependent on any editor.
Also automatic idiomatic formatting of lisp code is possible in any editor as long as they have the settings for it. Not sure how Emacs is the gatekeeper on that one.
What you say is entirely true in theory. An editor can have whatever it wants. Anything is possible—but somebody needs to do the work. If your favorite code editor is Zed, chances are nobody wrote proper Lisp indentation in it or any sort of Lisp interaction mode.
Why has it stuck with Emacs and its derivatives? I don't know. It seems interest in investing time to make a good Lisp environment for a non-Emacs editor fizzles out once it gets to the difficult part of productionizing it, which is why Emacs continues to be the #1 no-cost choice.
Someone threw out a Zed LSP for Common Lisp with LLMs help: https://github.com/etyurkin/zed-cl It requires heavy compilation of the wasm toolchain so I finally didn't try it. It seems it doesn't have a lisp debugger.
Emacs has support for all kind of programming languages and other tools. It's very easy to hack somethings and the effort required to polish it enough for a 0.1 release is small. Compared that to creating a plugin for VS Code or IDEA? Not worth it especially with the disjointed interfaces (Emacs has buffers and nothing else).
If the beginners are curious about Lisp and insist on using VSCode, they can install Calva and try Clojure. It takes less than a minute and it has a really good "quick start" guide. There's no rule that says you have to get into Lisp specifically via SBCL. Once you grok structural editing and REPL-driven workflow, jumping between different Lisp dialects is not that hard.
And if a programmer refuses to learn a new language, technique or paradigm just because their favorite editor doesn't support it... well, that is sad, but also - not everyone has to be passionate about their work, huge sectors of the economy are driven by mediocre players and that is just fine. Passionate programmers sooner or later find their way to Lisp.
For historical interest, Lem did used to advertise itself as a Common Lisp development tool specifically, but that has changed relatively recently (past year?). From my distant vantage point, it looks like general interest in it grew, and Lem itself evolved in general-purpose directions, so they pivoted the messaging to be about it serving as a general-purpose editor instead of one just for Common Lisp.
Will the French government view open source software as software which should be well-funded and well structured, ie Blender level quality and organization, or are they going to underfund it and thus have it succumb to the shenanigans of Redhat, aka IBM, the infamous pushers of Gnome and Wayland?
LOL
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