miniblog.

Neat elisp feature I learnt today: because closures are just lists, you can manually construct them and call them as functions: (mapcar '(closure (t) (x) (1+ x)) '(1 2 3)) ;; => '(2 3 4)

Jul 6, 2018

Total Download Size: 3292.10 MiB Total Installed Size: 13327.24 MiB Net Upgrade Size: 995.34 MiB Upgrading a (several months old) Arch Linux box, and you can definitely see that binaries tend to get bigger over time!

Jul 5, 2018

Announcing C++ Just My Code Stepping in Visual Studio - C++ Team Blog

Neat debugging feature in Visual Studio for C++: you can use the debugger to only step through code you've written, saving you stepping through layers of the standard library! https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2018/06/29/announcing-jmc-stepping-in-visual-studio/

In Visual Studio 2017 release 15.8 Preview 3 we’re announcing support for Just My Code stepping for C++. In addition to previously supported callstack filtering, the Visual Studio debugger now also supports stepping over non-user-code. As you “Step In”, for example in an algorithm from the Standard library with a custom predicate or in a […]

Jul 5, 2018

TIL OCaml has .mli files which are much like .h files in C: they define (and enforce) a public interface. This seems to be less popular in newer languages: we tend to prefer public/private annotations in a single file. I'm not sure why this changed.

Jul 5, 2018

The Fasinatng... Fascinating History of Autocorrect

Fun article discussing the early development of autocorrect, blacklisting unwanted words and working out what to correct: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/history-of-autocorrect/ (Also contains this remarkable comment: "As someone who typed the entire first draft of his book on a phone...")

David Sparshott Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn You Autocorrect. But despite the inadvertent hilarity, the real marvel of our mobile text-correction systems is how astoundingly good they are. It's not too much of an exaggeration \[…\]

Jul 3, 2018

Adding dragon emoji as semicolons in node.js or the typescript compiler: https://blog.angularindepth.com/instead-of-semicolons-what-if-you-could-code-with-dragons-df5d0a4ef4ee Nice post showing that working with programming language implementations need not be scary!

Syntactic Closures by Bawden amd Rees: https://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA195921 This 1988 paper explores an alternative Scheme macro system before hygienic macros were standardised.

Visual augmentation of source code editors: A systematic mapping study

Visual augmentation of source code editors: A systematic review https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02074 A useful paper categorising all the different ways IDEs can show additional metadata alongside the code. For example, they show this cute plugin (Clepsydra) that shows worst case runtime.

Source code written in textual programming languages is typically edited in integrated development environments or specialized code editors. These tools often display various visual items, such as icons, color highlights or more advanced graphical overlays directly in the main editable source code view. We call such visualizations source code editor augmentation. In this paper, we present a first systematic mapping study of source code editor augmentation tools and approaches. We manually reviewed the metadata of 5,553 articles published during the last twenty years in two phases -- keyword search and references search. The result is a list of 103 relevant articles and a taxonomy of source code editor augmentation tools with seven dimensions, which we used to categorize the resulting list of the surveyed articles. We also provide the definition of the term source code editor augmentation, along with a brief overview of historical development and augmentations available in current industrial IDEs.

Setting your commit email address - GitHub Docs

GitHub has made a considerable effort to let users hide their email addresses: https://help.github.com/articles/about-commit-email-addresses/ I totally understand that users find this desirable, but it's awkward to implement on top of git. GH provide a hook to prevent mistakes: https://help.github.com/articles/blocking-command-line-pushes-that-expose-your-personal-email-address/

You can set the email address that is used to author commits on GitHub and on your computer.

Blocking command line pushes that expose your personal email address - GitHub Docs

If you've chosen to keep your email address private when performing web-based operations, you can also choose to block command line pushes that may expose your personal email address.

A fun quiz on eval() in JS, and corner cases of its behaviour: https://blog.brownplt.org/2012/10/21/js-eval.html I've seen some of the gotchas before, but I still don't envy JS implementors.

S5: Engineering Eval

How do you bootstrap a trusted computing base? I suspect you'd want a C compiler that was small enough that you could read the entire disassembly and verify that it worked as expected. That seems intractable.

There's an awkward tension between auto-update and fixing security bugs. If platforms don't automatically update, users don't get security fixes. If they do update, you're giving the vendor RCE power.

Perl is still very much a glue language, even in areas that are largely statically typed. Haskell's GHC depends on it, OCaml's opam uses it, and Nix had a perl dependency until last year too!