miniblog.

Sometimes it's a real pain that JSON doesn't support comments. One positive consequence is that 'npm install' is always able to programmatically add new entries. Cargo's TOML is much harder to edit in a way that preserves comments, though solutions now exist.

I spent a while implementing a pretty-printer in elisp, only to realise that ielm already has a fine pretty-printer. Turns out that pp-to-string is built-in to Emacs! (I missed this initially because of the short name: I only found cl-prettyprint.)

A bit of humour in sample code makes a great first impression on your new users! This example is from

An impressive range of features have landed in IntelliJ 2018.1: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/specials/idea/whatsnew.html A ton of additional lints, but also some interesting completion features: using isInstace to infer types, and also leveraging JSON schema!

Really exciting to hear that Go is moving towards a package management tool! https://blog.golang.org/versioning-proposal It's also interesting that they've taken a different path to the npm/cargo school of thought, with a clearly explained rationale.

Fair criticism of Jupyter Notebooks, and how hard it is to apply good software engineering: https://medium.com/@alexander.mueller/5-reasons-why-jupyter-notebooks-suck-4dc201e27086 It's hard to transition from code in a notebook to standalone program or reusable library in my experience. I think a less stateful design would really help.

Interesting article on the cognitive burden of programming language features, and how it incentivises designs that are similar to today's popular languages: https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/programming_languages_and_the_speed_of_light.html

Rust is adding a new type for pointers to data that can't move! https://github.com/withoutboats/rfcs/blob/pin-and-move/text/0000-pin.md This is useful in lots of situations: dealing with FFI/GC in other language runtimes, self references, amongst others.

GitLab continues to innovate with its integrated VCS, CI, CD solution. The latest release adds a ton of new features: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/22/gitlab-10-6-released/ It's particularly interesting to see them offer CI for GitHub projects. A clever way of getting users to try their offering!

Sometimes I wonder whether the term 'metaclass' scares off developers. Perhaps ClassFactory would be better.

Hack, the PHP dialect, uses a persistent hh_server so linting, finding definitions etc is fast. Whilst this is a more common model today (language server protocol, YouCompleteMe), it's an interesting design considering PHP is based on short-lived processes.

I'm often surprised how many methods are in the Smalltalk base classes. For example, Object has an at: message for integer access (like foo[123] in Python).

The Ludwig editor has been open sourced! https://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news98662.html Ludwig was an early (38 years ago) editor offering full screen editing, which was wildly computationally expensive next to contemporary line editors.

The power of a completely introspective, mutable computer system, and how it fundamentally affects PL design: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16586347

It's always nice when other share their Emacs configuration with commentary! I discovered the google-this package from Jami Collinson's .emacs.d: https://jamiecollinson.com/blog/my-emacs-config/