miniblog.

I often use Quip for writing documents and I've started using Google Slides for presentations. They have fewer features than competing tools, but I like them. They have what I need, without being overwhelming. Maybe it takes a paradigm shift (e.g. desktop->web) to drop features.

Would you rather run a formally verified application on top of a conventional kernel/compiler toolchain, or a conventional application on verified kernel/compiler toolchain? Why?

Apparently the WTF license is used in software packaged by all major distros, and the FSF considers it valid!

Today I learnt that Emacs will do a best-effort parse of expressions in comments too, unless you set parse-sexp-ignore-comments. That's all well and good until org.el has ASCII smileys! https://github.com/bzg/org-mode/blob/4d8d7d6cb42e388572b4f5d227e9b3c9da6ca4a7/lisp/org.el#L4815-L4816 ("unbalanced paren")

A decent part of VMs being faster than AST interpreters is just memory layout AIUI. VM instructions are largely flat arrays, so there's less pointer chasing.

Today I learnt that cc-mode in Emacs includes a demo of defining a major mode for a small C-like language: https://cc-mode.sourceforge.net/derived-mode-ex.el "a hypothetical language called C: (pronounced "big nose") that is similar to Java" :)

Difftastic 0.36 is out! In this release: * Better diffs: Punctuation is now treated separately in the cost model * Nicer display: Changes in comments are now underlined too * New languages: Hare, Pascal and QML * Smarter detection of binary files

Shower thought: Printing runtime values is far more useful for product types than sum types. For a struct it's useful to see all the fields, but for a nullable int it's less useful to see 123.

On the tendency for short term software design decisions to impact thousands of people for years:

I tend to shy away from automatic, implicit behaviour in software. I've seen CMake setups where FindFoo.cmake is automatically picked up for configuring the Foo library. What are examples of tools with a larger amount of automagic behaviour that you like?

Today in aggravating edge cases: difftastic would crash when line-wrapping content where Unicode combining characters occurred on the boundary. Argh.

One habit I've picked up from blogging is putting *important statements in bold*. It's a really helpful technique, in moderation. It doesn't seem to be common in print media though.

"Slots" seems to have almost entirely fallen out of favour relative to "properties". Python uses both terms, are there any other cases where languages distinguish?

Tired: Unexpected IndexError Wired: Tried to access index 10 in a 4 item list ["x", "y", "z", ""]

Neither Spotify nor Skype use peer to peer functionality any more. Are there any consumer apps that still leverage P2P designs? Has bandwidth just become so cheap that it's unnecessary?