Lisp and Erlang are the only languages I've seen where a comment can start with a single character, but it's very common to use two (;; or %% respectively)
miniblog.
Thoughtful article on the long term consequences of AI generated art, copyright, the art industry and historical innovations (e.g. the invention of the camera):
https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/
Rust's editions make it much easier to change syntax over changing APIs. This is probably true in other languages too.
It's a really compelling argument for keeping your stdlib small when your language reaches 1.0.
"It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures." — Alan Perlis
I'm still not sure I agree with this: explicit data types are often nice. Following this maxim leads to pervasive lists or hash maps.
Apple is going to significantly open up iPhones, including allowing third party app stores! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-apple-allow-users-to-install-third-party-app-stores-sideload-in-europe
The TypeScript docs have IDE-like hover types on all the examples, which is really impressive.
I also like how the second example always shows the type of the relevant part, regardless of mouse position. It's clear and mobile friendly.
Screenshot from https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/everyday-types.html#literal-types
Do you prefer longer, readable keywords (e.g. function, export, foreach) or keyword that are shorter and faster to type (e.g. fun, pub, for)? Why?
Computing optimal 8501 instructions for rotations using an SMT solver and Racket with Rosette: https://lab.whitequark.org/notes/2020-04-06/synthesizing-optimal-8051-code/
One remarkable aspect of the JS packaging ecosystem is that people package individual functions. For example, lodash.sortby: https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash.sortby
It shows how lightweight the packaging process is. I've not seen this happen in other ecosystems.
Arrays being truthy in JS still catches me out sometimes.
In Python or Lisp, empty lists are falsey and truthiness is safe and idiomatic.
Building VaccinateCA, a website developed by volunteers to make vaccination information widely available.
It's a long read, but it explores a bunch of larger policy / organisational challenges they encountered in the public sector.
https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-story-of-vaccinateca/
Bun 0.3 will automatically install packages for you, rather than requiring an explicit install step. It's an interesting approach, and they've disabled install scripts to help security.
https://bun.sh/blog/bun-v0.3.0
Linux historically used magic numbers to recognise structs being used incorrectly with void pointers. These have been increasingly replaced with type-safe macros: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/915163/ba83480903b82cb8/
Some of the original files were unchanged from the 90s!
REPL driven development in Python, contrasting with TDD and Clojure workflows: https://davidvujic.blogspot.com/2021/09/can-we-have-that-in-python-too.html
Reflections on the challenges and relevance of Gnu Autotools after the first release in eight years: https://www.owlfolio.org/development/autoconf-swot/
I really like interpreters that allow you to inspect values, such as the JS console in a browser or Common Lisp with sly.
Otherwise you end up repeatedly pretty printing values. It's unnecessary.
@louis@emacs.ch Low level stuff needs a language without a GC (C/C++/Rust) and Android has been Java based throughout its history. I don't think they have much choice without rebuilding major components.
This article discusses how you often need #'foo rather than foo in Clojure code so you can redefine foo whilst testing your app interactively: https://srasu.srht.site/var-evaluation.html
Perhaps function pointers should evaluate to themselves? I wonder if there's a language solution here.
Every programming language attempts to expand until it has an effect system.
As Android moves away from C/C++ to a larger proportion of Java and Rust, its security vulnerabilities are measurably decreasing! https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-languages-in-android-13.html
Showing 501-520 of 7,506 posts