miniblog.

Dramatic post arguing that 'IO type' is far better for explaining Haskell than 'IO monad':
The Patchworks editor is an interesting project using a 3x2 grid of code snippets to try to help developers navigate code more effectively. 30 second video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGkGjZI21Mw Preliminary study: https://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2014VLHCC_GC_Patchworks.pdf In-depth study: https://www.cs.memphis.edu/~sdf/publications/Henley_et_al_VLHCC_2014.pdf
Designing a online communication tool *without* a green dot to inform users when you're online, to maximise productivity:
Will society adapt to the new challenges of global social media? A hopeful perspective: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/11/20/social-media-threat-people-survived-disease-we-can-handle-twitter-glenn-reynolds-column/879185001/
Best book I read last year: hands down, The Name Of The Wind. A masterfully written fantasy story. Sadly it's a trilogy and the third book hasn't been written yet. You have been warned :)
Happy New Year! Feliĉan Novan Jaron!
The problem with scrollbars is that they tell you nothing about the structure of content. Is that long scrollbar due to a huge blog post, or a short post with many comments underneath?
Implementing scope in an interpreter using shift/reset for delimited continuations: https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2005-09-13-scope-herding-with-delimited-continuations.html It's arguably overkill for the problem, but it's a well-argued introduction to shift and reset.
Composing music using MP3 encoding artifacts from the very samples used to test MP3 encoders!
Increasingly YouTube has become a source of reference material, for me at least. Rather than looking for (say) videos of dogs on skateboards, it's my first port of call for questions like 'how do I dissemble this device?'
Entertaining Stack Overflow discussion (from April 1st) of .png source code input to a C++ compiler: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5508110/why-is-this-program-erroneously-rejected-by-three-c-compilers I'm slightly horrified that you could accept .png source code and still be a standards compliant compiler!
Excellent post on learning effective Clojure and Smalltalk: https://lambdaisland.com/blog/29-12-2017-the-bare-minimum-clojure-mayonnaise They have different paradigms, and you need to approach them with different tools (and Emacs is not obligatory!)
Turns out that Emacs docstrings have an elaborate escaping mechanism. \[foo] shows the keybinding for foo, but \=\[foo] shows \[foo] literally. If you're a Helpful user, we now handle this correctly, *and* show handy buttons!
Reading https://theoutline.com/post/2689/mastodon-makes-the-internet-feel-like-home-again encouraged me to hit up Mastodon again. Still, all of the links in the article open in a browser, rather than the Mastodon client (Tusky) I've installed. Is better integration possible?
livid-mode: automatically evaluate JS as you type, as long as it's syntactically valid! https://github.com/pandeiro/livid-mode Based on the browser-based tools that provide this facility.
Showing 3,061-3,075 of 7,584 posts