An ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a text adventure game -- or as I like to call it, a compiler.
miniblog.
TIL Rust has an ambiguity `if Foo {}` -- is `Foo` a value of type bool, or a struct?
Rust solves this by defining a grammar production 'any expression except struct literals' and using it in this position.
It's so strange that we talk about languages being slow, and have done for years. Computer performance has increased so much in this time.
https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/is-python-slow/ (shared on HN in 2009) discusses Python being slow. My underpowered Thinkpad has 20x the single-threaded performance! https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/73vs3766/AMD-Athlon-64-4000+-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-PRO-4650U
Maybe *relative* performance of languages matters more?
It's so strange that we talk about languages being slow, and have done for years. Computer performance has increased so much in this time.
https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/is-python-slow/ (shared on HN in 2009) discusses Python being slow. My underpowered Thinkpad has 20x the single-threaded perf!
I like that most LLM UIs show your previous queries prominently.
When figuring out where LLMs are useful in your workflow, it's nice to see what worked well (or not) in the past.
Web search doesn't have this property. I rarely look at what I've previously googled.
I'm a fan of the Software Unscripted podcast, and I particularly enjoyed this recent episode about CrowdStrike and security culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzjaZssBEiI
The guest (Kelly Shortridge) compares attackers to lawyers trying to find loopholes. This is such a great analogy.
One interesting design choice in Emacs that I haven't seen in other editors: reserved shortcuts.
An Emacs extension shouldn't use F5 through F12, or Ctrl-c LETTER. This lets users configure their own shortcuts. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Key-Bindings.html
Does it exist elsewhere? I miss it in VS Code, where e.g. all the Fn keys are already assigned.
One interesting design choice in Emacs that I haven't seen in other editors: reserved shortcuts.
An Emacs extension shouldn't use F5 through F12, or Ctrl-c LETTER. This lets users configure their own shortcuts. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Key-Bindings.html
Does it exist elsewhere?
Really cute approach to reporting type errors: when there's a type error, show an example of a runtime error that the type check has prevented!
Data-Driven Techniques for Type Error Diagnosis https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59s4h4pv
Difftastic has been cited in a paper!
Modernizing SMT-Based Type Error Localization https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09034
The authors use difftastic to work out which parts of a buggy program have actually changed, a great use case :)
LLMs are a really accessible machine learning technique. I dabbled with text classifiers a few years ago and the APIs were way more involved.
(system_prompt: String, input: String) -> String
I can prototype with this much more easily!
Bootstrapping a language can be immensely satisfying.
I've added the ability to define stub types in the Garden stdlib and suddenly I don't need to special-case Int or String! They're just normal type declarations.
I'm a huge fan of Swift's 'Error Handling Rationale' design document: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/blob/9315673c003875158852579bd1f33480cdec5461/docs/ErrorHandlingRationale.md#fundamentals
It carefully defines terminology and compares with other languages, so you can understand Swift's position and preference in the design space.
I'm having fun writing a simple type checker, but I'm learning firsthand why syntax-directed checking doesn't work. It prevents inference.
My checker catches real bugs, but it can't handle cases like this:
[1, 2].map(fun(x) { x + 1; })
I think I need bidirectional checking.
I've been experimenting with an 'evaluate up to cursor' mode for my PL project.
I love evaluating self-contained snippets in Lisp, this generalises the idea.
The interpreter remembers the arguments when you run tests, then can re-use them when you say 'eval up to here'.
What do you think?
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