miniblog.

Realised today that one of my sites has been broken because a popular adblocker blocks any file called pageview.js: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/blob/6c17106ea9480b35e972aa183ded90e2252880f0/easyprivacy/easyprivacy_general.txt#L2195 I'd recently factored out a file with this name. It's a dev site that tries to have readable file names, but this incentivises minifying!

I've started reading this 1996 book on GC algorithms. A lot of the first chapter is just defending the value of GC! It's much less controversial today. I wonder whether the 90s rise of OO languages can be partly attributed to the increased productivity of automatic memory mgmt.

Interesting to see that WhasApp is exploring business accounts on the service: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/18/whatsapp-officially-launches-its-app-for-businesses-in-select-markets/ After using Monzo (superb integrated chat support) and Telegram (allows groups to be publically visible) I've wondered how WhatsApp could be extended.

Fun post on implementing a JIT for elisp, with a great introduction to calling conventions on elisp primitives: https://tromey.com/blog/?p=999

Implementing the eval function in Rust in Remacs! 🎉

If you're new to #python programming, welcome aboard! I've spotted a few techniques that newcomers miss out on and thus learn more slowly.

I've seen test runners that report the number of assertions checked, not just the number of tests. Is this useful? I understand if you have non-fatal assertions (like EXPECT_TRUE in googletest), but I think this is a rare feature in testing libraries.

It's unfortunate that '# foo' can mean "here's a command you need to run as root" or can mean "here's a comment about the next command". It's a recipe for confusion.

When a language has some central design principles, you can spot projects that work really well because they go well with that design.

There's an eslint plugin for extracting JS from HTML, so you can catch issues even when using inline JS!

Great talk by Bozhidar on the evolution of Clojure tooling in Emacs: https://youtu.be/4X-1fJm25Ww (covers an impressive range of features, explores the tooling landscape and has some entertaining Emacs metaphors!)

Now available on MELPA! https://twitter.com/_wilfredh/status/965745451055099904

Great, readable paper by Romain Robbes and Michele Lanza: Improving Code Completion with Program History It's a quantitative analysis of code completion tools, covering both static and dynamically typed languages!

Lots of IDEs provide a way of viewing the structure of a project: the directory structure, the package organisation, or the methods and fields of classes. Scaling these visualisations remains a hard problem. Large projects are hard to navigate in any tool.

A big appeal of Emacs, the infinitely customisable editor, is that you can mold it to perfectly fix your workflow. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Ikea Effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect increases the appeal too though.