miniblog.

The niche of short, environment-specific scripts, and the consequences for programming language design choices: https://brrt-to-the-future.blogspot.com/2021/03/why-bother-with-scripting.html

I'm a huge fan of Swift's 'Error Handling Rationale' design document: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/blob/9315673c003875158852579bd1f33480cdec5461/docs/ErrorHandlingRationale.md#fundamentals It carefully defines terminology and compares with other languages, so you can understand Swift's position and preference in the design space.

I've been experimenting with an 'evaluate up to cursor' mode for my PL project. I love evaluating self-contained snippets in Lisp, this generalises the idea. The interpreter remembers the arguments when you run tests, then can re-use them when you say 'eval up to here'. What do you think?