miniblog.

"To solve that emacs needs to be divorced from unexec, something that needs to get done as the marriage is unhealthy, but it’s going to take a lot to make that a reality right now." unexec perspectives from the Remacs gitter room
Great overview of how Haskell has evolved in 2017: https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/haskell_2018.html Includes some interesting comments about the future, e.g. the community gravitates towards pluggable extensions rather than evolving the base language.
git-worktree allows you to have multiple branches checked out simultaneously! https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
Conceptual simplicity does not always mean shorter code. I strongly prefer (add1 x) to (+ x 1), despite the latter being fewer keystrokes.
Building a syntax highlighter in Pharo Smalltalk! https://medium.com/@juliendelplanque/hacking-a-simple-syntactic-highlighter-around-specs-textmodel-44ba2e2b1ab9 I'm surprised no-one's built a text editor in Smalltalk yet: it seems like a great platform for an Emacs-style blob of functionality.
The npm ecosystem is massive, but it's the only PL packaging tool I'm aware of that has a for-profit company backing it. As a result, it has several full-time devs. Perhaps other PLs would benefit from a similar setup?
Whilst Java's ArrayList overallocates by 50%: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14129344/509706 I'm surprised to learn that Python only overallocates lists by ~12.5%: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.6/Objects/listobject.c#L49 I was not expecting such a range of values!
Env = Map<String, String> Args = [String] UnixCommand = (Env, Args, ByteStream) -> (Integer, ByteStream, ByteStream) Unix command compose pretty darn well, but it's a really weird API. Many of these inputs and outputs are less visible to newcomers too.
The Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum: https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-htdp-vs-sicp-journal/paper.pdf Discusses how to fit functional programming into a curriculum, the importance of tooling, and a fascinating discussion of SICP's strenghts and weaknesses as a first text book.
RISC-V state of the union: Linux, binutils, GCC, LLVM, CompCert and OCaml support! Government funded projects in India, Israel and USA! https://www.lowrisc.org/blog/2017/11/seventh-risc-v-workshop-day-one/ It's impressive how much momentum the project is developing.
It's fascinating to learn that we're still finding new ways of making primality tests faster.
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CLIs are reified UIs: https://www.expressionsofchange.org/reification-of-interaction/ Interesting exploration of what properties a text interface provides, and what it means for computer interaction.
Easier to read than write! I can't comment on Wolfram (I haven't used it), but this is a great goal to strive towards when coding. I've definitely experienced programs and languages where it's easier to write than read though.
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Really excited to see Remacs exploring bindgen as an option! https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/pull/486/ The C parts of Emacs use a ton of C features, so it's shaking out several bugs in bindgen itself.
A big milestone for Remacs: we now have CI running on Windows too! https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/pull/445 I can't take any credit for this: Jean Dudey has done an incredible job.
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