miniblog.

The rate of contributions to Pharo Smalltalk is increasing! https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/3814 Git isn't the easiest thing to learn, but it's definitely the lowest common denominator these days.

Replacing openSSL with Rustls can improve execution time, memory usage, and security! https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-rust-based-tls-library-outperformed-openssl-in-almost-every-category/ The potential performance improvements will probably motivate adoption even in C/C++ programs.

Pipe operator syntax is coming to JS! Babel is a fabulous way of enabling users to try out new syntax and report how they find it. https://babeljs.io/blog/2019/07/03/7.5.0

Docker has made managing my personal servers significantly easier. I can have autodeploy with https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower and proxy webservice ports with https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy. Not needing to write a server config makes me faster, and commit->auto image->auto deploy is magical.

One nice property of mastodon usernames is that they're instantly recognisable, like emails. When I saw @hund@linuxrocks.online on https://an3223.github.io/Living-without-the-modern-browser/ I immediately knew (due to the two @ signs) that it was a mastodon account.

Every software project seems to have a set of features you build only so it's better suited for its environment. For example, a perfectly functional website still benefits from a favicon, robots.txt, open graph tags and minification.

Getting started with Quantified Self projects, looking at ways to measure, leveraging your digital artifacts, and analysing results: https://quantifiedself.com/get-started/

Decompiling Super Mario 64 by carefully writing C that produces the same assembly! https://gbatemp.net/threads/super-mario-64-has-been-decompiled.542918/ A huge task, although shipping the game without aggressive optimisations made it easier apparently.

On Racket as a viable programming language for a range of tasks, and how non-programmers react to the parens:

Do open source users use services less than commercial users? I still find it amazing that I can store multi-GB images on Docker Hub as long as the projects are public. Docker and GitHub seem to made this economically viable.

Python and JS can both execute code when loading libraries (`import foo` and `require('foo')` respectively). Yet the Python CLI apps I've seen have to do much more work to ensure good startup performance (e.g. `myapp --help` not being slow). I'm not sure why.

@cwebber@octodon.social Thanks. I completely understand: I'm super hesitant to critique in public. I think syntax pivots are incredibly hard. When I learnt coffeescript I occasionally had to look at the compiled JS to understand the syntax. Somehow the JS felt more 'real' (and wasn't whitespace sensitive). Small syntax changes are much easier: just give the user an autofix script for their programs.

@kensanata@octodon.social Wow, I didn't know you'd explored this too! Thanks for sharing. What made you feel pressured? Do you find you treat content like a blog (timestamped, few changes after publication) or a wiki (interlinks, rewriting, dividing up big pages)?

@cwebber@octodon.social Interesting choice. So this will be the primary language, not some IR? I don't think I've seen any lisps pivot to non-paren syntax though. I can only think of Wisp and sweet-expressions (libraries with limited adoption AFAICT) and Dylan (a separate language made by lispers). What pivots did you have in mind?

When you install a package with npm, it reports "added M packages by N contributors". This is really helpful metric! Sometimes I split up my packages into several subpackages, but you still only have to trust me. The number of contributors is often more important.