miniblog.

The history of T: https://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html A remarkable Scheme predecessor with an optimising compiler, a pioneering tagged pointer implementation and a remarkable self-hosting GC!

Positional arguments work well, as do keyword arguments. I think it's a mistake to support both though. In e.g. Python it's hard to control how people will call you, and you may have differing views on the API you're exposing.

Astounding: plastic (3D printed) devices that can communicate with wi-fi devices by reflecting signals:

If you can afford the performance cost of a higher level language, it's probabably worth it. Great empirical study:

Great blog post discussing how Remacs' design has evolved: https://shanavas.org/rust/2017/11/08/remacs-the-journey-so-far.html

I have never regretted time spent learning more about jq: https://stackoverflow.com/q/26701538/509706 . There's a definite learning curve, but it's really powerful. Large blobs of JSON are ubiquitous in many REST APIs and nothing comes close to jq's convenience.

"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!

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.