miniblog.

It's also fascinating to see that Stroustrup's Rule (see https://www.thefeedbackloop.xyz/stroustrups-rule-and-layering-over-time/) applies to text adventure UIs too. Whilst they have a nice natural language syntax "go west", common commands quickly get abbreviated into something shorter.

Playing with LambdaMOO is an amazing time capsule into computing history. It really needs a good client (i.e. not just telnet in bash) but many clients have bitrotted severely. I ended up using a basic Emacs client:

I am fascinated to learn about MUSHes, multiplayer games/discussion rooms which support the users collaboratively editing the code of the game! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSH The programming language used is lisp influenced: https://duh.com/discordia/mushman/man2x1

There's something odd about screenshots of text adventure games. You capture the experience, but pictures of text is just so frowned upon in developer circles.

A vim-pacman mashup for learning key bindings!

How to Write Seemingly Unhygienic and Referentially Opaque Macros with Syntax-rules: a fun paper on macros in Scheme, and how you can subvert hygiene using only syntax-rules!

Let Over Lambda, a remarkable book on Common Lisp macros, has a cute demonstration of how to get lisp-1 semantics using macros. It does make me think about defaults though. I can create a 1-indexed array in JS, Perl or Python, but I wouldn't in practice.

Common Lisp has a type of macro that I've never seen before, called a 'symbol macro'. This is like a normal macro, where you define an expansion for a symbol, but if the symbol is let-bound, it stays as a plain variable! https://clhs.lisp.se/Body/m_defi_1.htm

Consumption data has become increasingly important: newer podcast apps and ebook apps both provide creators with interesting feedback. 'Click to read full article' buttons on webpages are a slight pain, but they do help authors measure bounce rate.

Facebook have launched their own static type checker for Python, as an alternative to mypy! https://m.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-graph/pyre-fast-type-checking-for-python/2048520695388071/ It uses the same syntax, but seems more focused on Language Server Protocol integration.

Rust 1.26 is out! https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/05/10/Rust-1.26.html In addition to some lovely language improvements, they've added a convenience function for slurping a text file given its path. It's the little things :)

I am delighted and honoured that some of the users of my Emacs packages are using them on Remacs and finding bugs!

A lovely analogy from Play Emacs like an Instrument: https://200ok.ch/posts/2018-04-27_Play_Emacs_like_an_Instrument.html 3d printers are awesome, but text editors have a powerful generic utility that make them a very valuable part of your toolbox.

I'm gradually coming round to the view of the Discourse developers that comment trees are harmful. If I have a long discussion with someone, our comments get very narrow. Nonetheless, understanding the structure of conversation is valuable. I wish I knew of better tools.

Teaching Programming Languages by Experimental and Adversarial Thinking: https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/pkf-teach-pl-exp-adv-think/ A fascinating approach to teaching programming paradigms. Implement different language semantics in the same syntax, and ask students to write programs that distinguish between them!