miniblog.

uLisp, a great little lisp for embedded devices, has a helpful page for debugging. It's great to see function tracing and debugging with continuations described *before* print debugging! https://www.ulisp.com/show?19X5

Prettier 1.13 has had a ton of polish, but this feature really caught my eye: it explicitly adds parentheses to arithmetic operations, to avoid confusion regarding precedence!

There's a curious ephemerality to MOOs. You can create rooms and objects in the shared programmable universe, but if you don't log on for a while, it's all deleted.

ArchUnit is really neat way of testing Java, using reflection to enforce code style ('architecture') properties. For example, enforcing that all subclasses of Connection have a name ending with 'Connection':

Riveting video explaining what LambdaMOO is, and why immersive, programmable, text-based multiplayer games are still interesting today: https://youtu.be/SxGbHYGTGWw

Emacs for Vim users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y4OuHfxgmI Great introductory video to Emacs principles, especially for those with a vim-ish background.

The surprisingly high likelihood of a kernel bug being due to cosmic rays! https://lwn.net/Articles/219983/

I don't understand the preference in ML family to use currying so enthusiastically. Eg in the signature of a sort function, I prefer (a,a)->Ord as the comparator function signature, vs a->a->Ord. It's easier to distinguish inputs and outputs. Are there upsides I'm missing?

Jensen's Device is this fun (though slightly bananas) programming technique for call-by-name programming languages. Note how we're iterating over V[i] in this example!

I'm amused to learn that many MUSHes have a notion of in-game currency used to pay for compute: https://github.com/pennmush/pennmush/blob/master/game/txt/hlp/penntop.hlp#L794 This very much predates Ethereum or AWS Lambda pay-per-API call!

Emacs, or perhaps lisps in general, are a profoundly weird development experience. I've found a bug with byte compilation, so I'm stepping through the byte-compiler live in my current Emacs instance and amazingly everything works.

This is a great perspective: bug reports should be clear, with reproduction instructions, but they need to be persuasive too.

I'm fascinated to see Steve Losh demonstrating a 'gather' macro in Common Lisp, removing boilerplate for an accumulator: https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/05/fun-with-macros-gathering/ Most use of yield in Python seems to be focused on gathering rather than lazy evaluation, but I never had a name for the concept!

We still generally expect web services to have both apps and websites that suit conventional PC form factors. Should we?

Lambda, the Ultimate Political Party: https://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html On the differences between languages, and what makes a PL a lisp. Community values and priorities, not just language features!