miniblog.

It's amazing how little platforms change philosophy after creation. The web started as an open project and remains so after wide deployment. It has not made Tim Berners-Lee rich. Twitter, however, has a single owner, so its growth lead to an IPO and the founders making money.

It's so easy to misuse animations in UI design. A great post on tasteful, effective animation:

Excellent diagnostics improvements landing in GCC 8:

Many languages have a notion of 'finalizers', but Racket has rather macabre 'will' functionality instead! https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/willexecutor.html Succinct and memorable, but 'will' is overloaded in English unfortunately.

Scheme and Common Lisp are much more different than I realised. They have very different error handling models, object systems, approaches to documentation (e.g. use of docstrings), not to mention conventions on iteration, recursion and early termination.

Lentic is a cute Emacs project that lets you have different views of the same buffer content. Video demo: https://vimeo.com/116078853 with the author viewing elisp comments as org-mode syntax and editing like a normal org-mode buffer! Think multiple-major-mode on steroids.

Wikipedia has had hoax articles on it, some lasting over a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia Fictional devices, fictional TV series, even fictional people!

Visualising the execution of functional programming languages by stepping through a graphical AST representation:

Jedi, the excellent Python code completion library used by many editors and even ipython, now supports mypy annotations in Python 2! https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi/issues/946 🎉

Given an abundance of information (especially online), we need to be more skilled at verifying the sources and the reputation of the chain of outlets: https://aeon.co/ideas/say-goodbye-to-the-information-age-its-all-about-reputation-now

Really cute Clojure project that builds a full parse tree (i.e including whitespace), allows code to transform the _abstract_ syntax tree, then splices the changed sexp whilst preserving source comments! https://vimeo.com/45695419 Enables code transformations that look like macros.

Viewing 25 year old files authored in desktop publishing tools on today's software (e.g. Word, Wordperfect): https://archives.govt.nz/resources/information-management-research/rendering-matters-report-results-research-digital-object-0

When people talk about federated systems, they frequently compare with email. Email has been successfully distributed, but I think it's an outlier. It's rare, especially today, for popular tech to be distributed with multiple implementations.

Clever vim plugin: given a series of string literals containing an interpolated variables, prompt the user for values and send the query to a real DB! https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=356 (convenient, but I hope it doesn't promote code vulnerable to SQL injection)

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!