I don’t know about you, but I had a pleasant Saturday. It started with an hour or so of the Coursera Programming Languages videos. I learned a little bit about SML, and have been trying to remember the instructor’s caution about comparing what’s learned in class to other languages. It’s supposed to be a fresh perspective on programming.
Some time in the evening was spent playing Torchlight 2 and fiddling with things on the Windows partition of my machine.
Recently I have been spending more time in Windows. I don’t really know why. Could just be a seasonal thing. Every few months I get bored of the tools and languages I’m using, and start looking for new combinations. Most of the Free and Open Source Software that I enjoy is available on any operating system I feel like using, so it isn’t that big of a deal.
Sometimes I discover something completely new to me when I do these switches. One of my discoveries this time around on Windows is chocolatey. chocolatey is a package manager for Windows. It allows you to install a surprising range of software utilities from an administrative command line - cmd.exe or PowerShell will work.
According to their front page, there are currently 2,257 unique packages available in the chocolatey system. There are plenty of expected FOSS tools such as editors and programming languages. There are also many utilities that I always end up installing on Windows, like Paint.NET and PuTTY.
I didn’t find chocolatey until after installing my core Python and Perl toolset, but both are available. Here’s Python and Here’s Perl. It looks like the version of Strawberry Perl in chocolately is a little behind, so it probably helps to pay attention to available versions.
Ruby and Emacs are installed via chocolatey, though. I definitely want to spend some more time with chocolatey. It seems quite nice at first glance.
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Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-01-26