cartesius13

I'm a 22 years old hobbyist software developer and sysadmin enthusiast. I've been using linux in all my computers since I was 15 and I mainly program in Go, shell script, and Javascript. I work at a factory and recently for promoted to my first white collar position, so for the first time in my life I work at a computer. The position is production control, nothing to do with software development.

The computers at the company, however, are running Windows. It's very jarring going from 7 straight years of linux to Windows 10. I like creating scripts and tools for myself at home, so using Windows is often painful and feels like a slog. What I wanted to ask you is tools for making my experience less terrible. I recently discovered and started using AutoHotKey which is awesome and I'm sure will be of great use and I've also been trying to get into Excel programming (Excel is an important part of my job). What software would you recommend for someone in my position? The catch is that it must be something that doesn't have an "Install" step. Whenever I try to install anything it asks for an administrator password that I don't have, but things like notepad++ you just grab an .exe and run the program directly with no issues

What I'm missing is things like shell tools, shell scripts, text manipulations tools, rofi/dmenu, pdf tools, a rich text editor that isn't MS Word (I know markdown and html)

Ocaml, Standard ML, F# or maybe some lesser known one? Right now I'm mainly using Go because of its simplicity, rich ecosystem (many libs), great docs, great tooling etc.

Which ML is good in all these points?

I mean in the sense of being a classic, highly praised and known as a book that can change someone's life forever

I'm currently reading and studying formal languages using books, mainly 'Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation' by Hopcroft and Ullman. But I also been enjoying reading articles from Tomasseti[0] and would like to know if there are some other sites/blogs that focus on topics like programming languages, parsing, natural language processing, regular expressions, grammar, text processing, text encoding, Unicode and even non-computer linguistics.

I guess I wouldn't mind some book recommendations as well

[0] https://tomassetti.me/

I've always been interested in languages and grammar so when I got into programming I was immediatelly interested in programming languages

The problem I'm having is that I see all these terms being thrown around like BNF, Chomsky Hierarchy, context-free, context-sensitive and regular grammars, LL, LR LALR Parsers, Automata etc.

Most books assume I don't care about the theoretical details and are more focused on implementing programming languages quickly and with only the minimum knowledge required for doing so. But I actually do care about the theoretical details more than implementing a programming language, which is why I come ask you what introductory books on these topics would you recommend