miniblog.

I'm having fun writing a simple type checker, but I'm learning firsthand why syntax-directed checking doesn't work. It prevents inference. My checker catches real bugs, but it can't handle cases like this: [1, 2].map(fun(x) { x + 1; }) I think I need bidirectional checking.

Today I learnt that Racket *intentionally* doesn't have a traditional REPL workflow. The authors were concerned about students not understanding the state between the current session and the code on disk. (Arguably Jupyter has some of these features now.) https://blog.racket-lang.org/2009/03/the-drscheme-repl-isnt-the-one-in-emacs.html

Are there any package managers that treat changelogs as a first class concept? I end up looking for a CHANGELOG.md or a CHANGES.txt in the source code repository every time. The lack of standard prevents package hosting services being able to show changes.