miniblog.

"Writing a good indentation function can be difficult and to a large extent it is still a black art."

I've been reading the Simple Minded Indentation Engine docs today. It's impressively featureful, but not as simple as I expected.

Even in 2016, we're still exploring the best way to display CLI compiler errors. Some interesting iterations in Rust

Suppose you are 2x more productive in lang A than lang B. How much more popular (libraries, community) would B need to be for you to use it?

Different emoji fonts can radically affect interpretation: https://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-miscommunication-using-emoji/ (similar problems exist for ASCII smileys)

I've observed that you can increasingly substitute 'cloud' with 'technology' without any loss of precision.

Using vim to do inline edits in a pipeline, similar to sed: https://blog.robertelder.org/use-vim-inside-a-unix-pipe-like-sed-or-awk/ (slightly ridiculous but nifty!)

Sometimes I think we use the term lisp-2 as a pun, meaning 'the next version after Lisp 1.5'.

'How often do you use a language where you have to leave it to compile?' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY The computer revolution hasn't happened yet

I rather like the new GitHub option for squashing commits when merging PRs. For PRs of a single commit, it's much tidier.

The very first commit to git has a great overview of how git works:

C-h f with ido is a brilliant way of discovering functionality. I was looking to mark Python statements, and found er/mark-python-statement!

Interesting LLVM thread on inlining: https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-April/097891.html (great idea wrt inlining when arguments are constants)

Fun udevd bug on Ubuntu: when not running under systemd, it would attempt to kill every process on the system!

Judging a language by its syntax is a little like judging a book by its covers. Syntax is often superficial.

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