miniblog.

@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.

What do you choose for your URL structure when building a website, and why? For example, consider a wiki. Would you do /PageName (short but name clashes), /page/PageName (verbose, clear) or /p/PageName (no clashes, but unclear)?

Proposals for adding different emotions to the 💩 emoji have prompted discussions on the role of the emoji subcommittee and the priorities of the Unicode consortium: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/inside-the-great-poop-emoji-feud

It would be really useful to have a scale of how willing a project is to accept contributions. You'd have a sense of how likely your patch or bug report is going to be acted on.

VS Code is exploring a model where you have multiple processes supporting the IDE: a fast syntax checker, and a slower error checking/completion service! https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_36#_use-syntax-only-feature-of-javascript-and-typescript-more-quickly (Cute model, but I wonder if the lack of threads in node makes it more necessary.)

The base ISA for RISC-V has been ratified, so there's a stability promise!

I've always wondered why npm defaults to the ISC license rather than MIT. MIT seemed more well-known and similarly permissive. Turns out that ISC is essentially a shorter MIT!

Why did Daniel Stenberg create curl, release it for free, and continue maintaining it? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55884514/what-is-the-incentive-for-curl-to-release-the-library-for-free (Stack Overflow is big enough that they get answers from the maintainer himself!)

Exploring DWARF objects interactively in Pharo:

A really neat idea for LLVM: AST interpreters are slow, so clang's constexpr evaluator is slow. Write a small bytecode interpreter to make constexpr execution scale better!

I have a fondness for visible pixelation: pixel art, bitmap fonts, displays with large LEDs. It's a medium that's distinctly technological. I can display high resolution photos or realistic graphics on a modern device, but it's less distinct. The medium doesn't affect the msg.

I rather like the fs.readFileSync API in node. It gives you a buffer, unless you specify a text encoding. This gently encourages users to think about their encoding, without having a heavyweight unicode datatype.

Commonmark.js has a lovely feature that's rare in markdown renderers: it exposes an AST! https://github.com/commonmark/commonmark.js/#usage This makes it so much easier to extend/modify the syntax in a robust manner.

I'm coming to the view that microblogs (tweets) and normal blogs are too time focused. There's a pressure for novel ideas, ideas must be polished, and they assume you don't want to edit old ideas. Perhaps a bliki is a better model?