miniblog.

I'm coming to the conclusion that CS papers need to be printed. They don't suit ereaders (PDFs don't reflow), they're too small on smartphones and I find a laptop less portable. I suppose the clue is in the name!

Python's yield keyword is rarely useful for laziness. I've only taken advantage of lazy computation a handful of times, e.g. dealing with paginated APIs. The main advantage is syntactic sugar for producing iterables. Yield is much nicer than appending to a list and returning it!

Emacs lisp isn't really a lisp-2. It's more of a lisp-3: the variable namespace, the function namespace, and whatever has been dumped in the symbol plist.

Emacs is the only API I've seen with a bit of french in it. For example, file-name-sans-extension.

Langsec after Spectre may push us towards more of a 'basic science to figure out how things work' model:

Regular interruptions leading to an increase in procrastination! https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/your-smartphone-is-making-you-stupid/article37511900/ (the article is partly fearmongering, but makes some nuanced points)

This is wild: compiling SMT problems to C++ then using coverage guided fuzzing to find solutions!

If you someone made a concerted effort to put malware in a low level npm package, how hard would it be to detect? Worryingly, it would be really difficult.

Lovely talk from @strangeloop_stl showing Black, a Scheme where you can recursively make changes to evaluation! In the picture, Nada is demonstrating adding a special form (not macro!) for instrumentation. Mind bending.

I find mypy very helpful for refactoring Python codebases. It sometimes finds bugs before I run my refactored code, but a large percentage of the time it's just helpfully pointing out where I have the wrong number of args. Pareto principle strikes again.

Blogged: The Emacs Guru Guide to Key Bindings

'Component-based Program Synthesis in OCaml' is a nice 2017 paper on program synthesis in OCaml. https://www-scf.usc.edu/~zhanpenl/prog_syn.pdf Some impressive examples, but programmatically generating friendly variable names remains a hard problem. JSNice is the only nice solution I've seen.

Interpreters are a great example of software tools where it's easy to settle for something that's easy to implement. Many interpreters don't have native support for displaying result data types as images. I've only seen Racket and Smalltalk offer this.

Emacs has a wonderful mode called dired, which is great for viewing or bulk renaming the contents of directories. Apparently, there's a C program of the same name, and it's unknown which came first! https://invisible-island.net/ded/

Thoughtful article on a trend of building smaller, kinder online communities: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter Traditionally we distinguish between 'plaza' and 'rabbit warren' designs of social media, but perhaps there are interesting designs between those extremes.