miniblog.

I'm never sure what version of Rust to target for my projects. For difftastic I pinned to rust 1.57 and I haven't needed to bump it so far. Debian stable is still on 1.48 though!

@nihilazo @eli_oat @technomancy @csepp The thing I like about lisps is the ability to build functions around snippets until I've written a whole program. It's interactive and pleasant. I agree that the advocacy is distracting. The book Let Over Lambda has interesting ideas but it's *so* convinced that lisp is always the best. I sometimes find it hard to read too. It's easy for different patterns to look visually similar.

Tests may not guarantee correctness, but they are often suggestive. When I have a bunch of regression tests for *real* issues, I feel a lot more confident. I'm covering ways I've failed in the past.

I'm impressed by how many options I'm offered in Common Lisp (in this case sbcl on Sly) for a simple error like an invalid variable name!

I'm curious to try bluesky: anyone tried it?

I still find it odd that non-OO languages use the term "object" in their docs. I've seen it in both C and Emacs Lisp. Example:

Are there any languages that have both pattern matching and statement oriented syntax? In principle these are orthogonal, but I'm struggling to think of a language with pattern matching that isn't expression oriented.

I'm super impressed that LLMs are scaling down and WebGPU is improving to the point that you can run a reasonable LLM in the browser!

In Python I can choose any name for my instance variable when defining a method. In practice people almost always use `self`. Go has the same flexibility, but using other names for the instance is totally normal!

Every time I implement an interpreter with recursion, I regret it. As soon as I want TCO, or userland control of stack limits, or resumable exceptions, I need my own stack. This is awkward because it's an upfront design decision. Changing the stack model is a big refactoring.

Which programming languages follow the "cathedral" design philosophy, where they provide most of: the runtime, stdlib, debugger, LSP, test harness, code formatter and package manager? Go, Dart and Smalltalk are the closest I can think of.

Having a conversation with a PDF is a really fun application of LLM technology: https://www.chatpdf.com/

I enjoyed this interview with Lukas Wirth, one of the maintainers of rust-analyzer: https://rustacean-station.org/episode/lukas-wirth/ I didn't realise how little code was shared between rustc and rust-analyzer (only lexing and type layouts). This makes it hard to track new Rust features.

I'm really impressed with this Rust error message: if you write %s instead of {} in your format string, it helpfully tells you that your syntax is wrong!

I'm a huge fan of languages that require you to explicitly export your functions (e.g. pub in Rust or export in JS). It's much easier to change than a separate header file (.h in C, .mli in OCaml) and it enables local reasoning. You can see from the definition if it's exported.