miniblog.

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.)

I don't really understand Rust's `loop {}` syntax. It's syntactic sugar for `while true {}` but it feels odd to have special syntax for this case. The name `loop` also doesn't imply 'loop with no termination condition' to me (other than break/continue).

Python is adding column numbers to its exceptions, making tracebacks way more readable!

Are there any noteworthy lisp dialects that don't have macros? Macros aren't obligatory, but I'm struggling to think of any good lisp examples that lack them.

Super impressed that the UK government does regular scanning for vulnerabilities for servers based in the UK: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/information/ncsc-scanning-information Preventative and good for the overall ecosystem.

A cute project that finds Clojure stdlib functions based on an example input and output: https://borkdude.github.io/re-find.web/?args=2&ret=3

Underrated perk of JSON: it's easy to programmatically make changes to a file made by a human. Very few other formats have this advantage. `cargo add` took a bunch more implementation work than `npm install`, because preserving TOML comments takes more work.

I write a lot of markdown, so I'm comfortable with the format, but *asterisks* for *italics* still seems strange to me. I mentally read it as bold, and some mailing list web frontends to the same thing.

@dcreemer@octodon.social I set it up once and I've never needed to fiddle again: it's worked really well. I also use Tusky on my phone to read toots and respond to folks. I don't want my Mastodon usage to be write only.

Applying different profile guided optimisation techniques to the rust compiler:

Efficiently sandboxing Firefox by compiling potentially vulnerable libraries to wasm, and then compiling wasm to C!

On the remarkable inertia of database and programming language choices early in the life of a company:

I get a lot of value from tech/PL microblogging as @_wilfredh on Twitter, and often get interesting comments. I'm not sure how much the new CEO will affect that. I also cross-post to https://mastodon.social/@wilfredh and have interesting discussions there too. Both are worthwhile today.

I'm experimenting with line number styling in difftastic. The first screenshot is the old version, and the second screenshot shows the new. I want line numbers to be visually distinct from content. The new version is using dim text for unchanged lines, and bold otherwise.