miniblog.

I've never seen a language add a full-featured REPL later in its life. It's incredibly hard to add "update function definition" interactively. Clojure is an interesting case. It was developed with a REPL in mind, but the JVM was not. Perhaps the VM matters less here?

https://twitodon.com/ is a neat tool for finding Mastodon people that you were already following on Twitter. It generates a CSV that Mastodon can consume. Of the 3,154 folks I follow, it found 117 Mastodon accounts. AIUI it requires other users to use the service.

I feel like enums/variants/tagged unions are underexplored in dynamically typed languages. As soon as you see a pattern match for a given enum variant (e.g. colour::RED), your can IDE can be helpful if the enum definition changes. Normally I only get this with static typing.

Do you think there will be a significant Twitter outage (>1 hour downtime) in the near future? If so, when?

The Self programming language, the optimisation techniques they pioneered, and the emergent design principles: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ka4KY7TMTU (Stanford talk by one of the creators)

The Makefile problem, or how absurdly hard it is to write paths in a text file whilst supporting both *nix and Windows:

If I ever bootstrap a self hosting language, I'd be really tempted to do it in JS or TS. Not only are JS runtimes widely available, but it'd be way easier to do in-browser playgrounds!

Advice from one of the authors of Common Lisp on PL work: established languages tend to win in their domain. It really helps if you enjoy working in this space. (There is a ton of PL skill and insight in the smaller languages IME.) https://pldb.com/posts/scottFalhmanInterview.html

I've had a ton of great conversations on Twitter: there's a bunch of programming expertise (even programming language design) here. There are niches here that don't exist elsewhere. I've also found a great job through Twitter on two occasions. No idea what the future will be. https://twitter.com/_wilfredh/status/1592389610457673729

If Twitter isn't available, I will be still be microblogging/tooting at https://mastodon.social/@wilfredh and you can DM me via my blog:

I've released difftastic 0.38! In this release: * Better display of line numbers * A bunch of display bugs fixed * Better handling of parse errors in input files

Is there any way of doing tagged references in safe Rust? I've been looking at tagged pointers (the crate https://docs.rs/tagged-pointer/latest/tagged_pointer/ looks excellent) but it gives you back a raw pointer. I'm not sure if you can create a safe wrapper for references using tagged pointers.

When someone says "you should use the cloud", I'm never sure if they mean: 1: use a virtual server rather than running your own hardware, or 2: use hosted services rather than running your own e.g. database 2 is often surprisingly expensive IME.

Writing docs like characters in a novel: give people a purpose! https://thenewstack.io/an-engineers-best-tips-for-writing-documentation-devs-love/

One fun side effect of lisp-style syntax: there's always a close token that corresponds to each expression. You can hover unambiguously. (This tiny web page is at https://pl-toys.surge.sh/ if you want to play with it.)