Learning reactionary programming will give you a deep understanding of programming and will enable to you to write your own programs and websites. However this is not enough to get a job with modern scum (members of depraved modern culture). Modern scum will expect you to use tools popular with them, so you would have to learn one of those. Probably the least horrible programming tool used by modern scum is Python, so I would recommend learning that if you want a job.
The next 3 lessons are basic computer literacy. Even if you are not interested in programming, these would be useful skills.
I will develop this course incrementally based on demand. Whenever anyone completes the content here, I will add another lesson/section. This way I won't waste my time writing content that no one will use.
This course will be designed for you to learn reactionary programming in a logical sequence. I will focus on finding relevant resources, and I will only write explanations when nothing else is available on the subject. I will focus on web development since that is what I know best.
I will often say "Do X" without saying how to do X. A big part of programming is figuring out how to do things. Your two main resources are Google and ChatGPT. If you get stuck, you can ask me.
ChatGPT has become an essential programming tool. So the only task for this lesson is to play with ChatGPT. Later you can ask it technical questions.
If you have any questions, you can ask me on Discord.
A text editor is a basic tool for reactionary programmers. We use simple flexible tools. Modern scum use an IDE which is big, complicated, and inflexible. We don't use such tools.
I reviewed the available text editors and I think Sublime Text is the best one available. So please download it and learn how it works.
JSON is the most popular text data format. I think JSON was the last good programming idea from modern culture, developed around 2001, before modern culture became fully depraved. Do your own research on JSON to understand it. It is fairly simple.
I paired Sublime Text with JSON because Sublime Text uses JSON files for its settings. (Actually not quite pure JSON because it includes comments which are lines starting with //.) Experiment with Sublime Text settings to learn more about both Sublime Text and JSON.
Bash is the other basic tool for reactionary programmers. I was hoping to just reference existing Bash tutorials in this lesson, but they are all horrible, so I am writing my own. So for this lesson, please read my tutorial.
Thankfully Mercurial is well documented. Read Mercurial: The Definitive Guide up to (and including) chapter 9.
To get started with Mercurial, download Mercurial from their website and install it. Then do:
~/learn $ hg version
Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 5.2.2)
(see https://mercurial-scm.org for more information)
Copyright (C) 2005-2019 Matt Mackall and others
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
~/learn $
If this works, it is installed properly. Next set up your Mercurial configuration file which is ~/.hgrc on a Mac or /c/Users/$(whoami)/mercurial.ini on Windows MSYS2. My hgrc file looks like this:
[ui]
username = Franklin Schmidt
You should register on our Mercurial hosting service and use your email as the username and the assigned password in .hgrc. The last two blocks set up hg dm to call DiffMerge by using the Extdiff extension.
Now you can play with https://hg.reactionary.software/repo/test/ like this:
~/learn $ hg clone https://hg.reactionary.software/repo/test/ hgtest1
no changes found
updating to branch default
0 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
~/learn $ hg clone https://hg.reactionary.software/repo/test/ hgtest2
no changes found
updating to branch default
0 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
~/learn $ ls -Fd h*
hgtest1/ hgtest2/
~/learn $ cd hgtest1
~/learn/hgtest1 $ touch file.txt
~/learn/hgtest1 $ e file.txt
~/learn/hgtest1 $ cat file.txt
some text
~/learn/hgtest1 $ hg status
? file.txt
~/learn/hgtest1 $ hg add file.txt
~/learn/hgtest1 $ hg status
A file.txt
~/learn/hgtest1 $ hg pull
pulling from https://hg.reactionary.software/repo/test/
no changes found
~/learn/hgtest1 $ hg commit -m 'add file.txt'
~/learn/hgtest1 $ hg push
pushing to https://hg.reactionary.software/repo/test/
searching for changes
remote: adding changesets
remote: adding manifests
remote: adding file changes
remote: added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files
~/learn/hgtest1 $ cd ../hgtest2
~/learn/hgtest2 $ hg pull
pulling from https://hg.reactionary.software/repo/test/
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files
new changesets aab34516d8dc
(run 'hg update' to get a working copy)
~/learn/hgtest2 $ hg update
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
~/learn/hgtest2 $ hg status
~/learn/hgtest2 $ cat file.txt
some text
~/learn/hgtest2 $ e file.txt
~/learn/hgtest2 $ cat file.txt
some text
and more
~/learn/hgtest2 $ hg status
M file.txt
~/learn/hgtest2 $ hg pull
pulling from https://hg.reactionary.software/repo/test/
searching for changes
no changes found
~/learn/hgtest2 $ hg dm
~/learn/hgtest2 $ hg commit -m 'and more'
~/learn/hgtest2 $ hg push
pushing to https://hg.reactionary.software/repo/test/
searching for changes
remote: adding changesets
remote: adding manifests
remote: adding file changes
remote: added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files
Google Chrome is the standard client-side web development tool. So the first step is to make sure that you have Chrome installed and running.
Using Chrome, on any page you can right-click in an empty area and from the menu select "View Page Source". This will show you the HTML for the webpage. If you try this on different websites, you will probably notice that my webpages are fairly short and well organized while the webpages of modern scum are unreadable. Another thing to try is to right-click anywhere in a page and select "Inspect". This should open the developer tools with the tab "Elements" selected. In this tab, you get the HTML organized as tree that can be expanded to collapsed. The "Elements" tab of Chrome developer tools will be your core tool when you work with HTML and CSS. You should play with it and do your own research on it to learn how it works.
The next step is to download this website like this:
~/learn $ wget -r -k http://www.reactionary.software/
--2024-01-15 01:31:20-- http://www.reactionary.software/
...
~/learn $ cd www.reactionary.software/
~/learn/www.reactionary.software $ ls -F
about.html hg_dev.html mercurial.html
bash.html index.html needed.html
books.html java.html nginx.html
discussion.html java_fork.html python.html
existing.html learn.html site.css
external_link.svg learn_bash.html this.html
freedit.html lucene.html wysiwyg.html
index.html is the home page. Find it in Mac Finder or Windows File Explorer, and then drag-and-drop it into Chrome. You should see this website. You can open the files in a text editor to see the HTML. And you can edit these files to see how the web page changes.
There is good documentation on HTML and CSS. Start with Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web. This was written by the people who invented CSS and explains the core idea. Read the whole book. This book covers almost everything in this website. The only missing piece is flexbox. Next get CSS: The Definitive Guide. You should also read this whole book, but you can do it slowly as you work with CSS. You don't need to read this book right now, you can wait until you have finished the next two lessons.
Just play with HTML and CSS until you get a basic understanding of how they work. You should be able to understand the HTML and CSS of this website.
I left out resources for HTML itself. You should just look up HTML tags with Google or ChatGPT as you encounter them. That is good enough to learn HTML.
Ideally one should be able to look at web pages around the internet to learn. But unfortunately they are mostly overcomplicated crap that is very difficult to understand. You can try. My personal websites are like this one - very simple, so they don't look professional to modern scum. I can't link to my best commercial website because that would ruin its reputation (because I am infamous). But I can link to some of my old commercial websites here and here. These have reasonable HTML and CSS.
I have a few general principles for working with HTML and CSS. First, modern scum claim that HTML is for content and CSS is for styling. This is bullshit. Both HTML and CSS are for layout, don't think of them as being conceptually different. Just use both in the simplest possible way to get the results you want. Don't bother with the useless new HTML5 content tags like header. Just use div and span for most things. Also I use HTML attributes as selectors, not HTML classes. This is just simpler. HTML classes are useless, leave them for modern scum.
You will need HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Luan to make a website. So I suggest that you get a basic understanding of each of these and then go back later to study them in greater depth.
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