miniblog.

Claude asked me a question today: was I looking for an Emacs plugin (because I was talking about elisp) or a Rust program (because I have configured Rust preferences)? I'm really impressed, it's rare to see LLMs ask follow-up questions. (I wanted Emacs in this case.)

I'm adding a += operator to my programming language, because writing `x = x + 1` is tedious. This opens the tricky design question of which operators should support this. Is += and -= sufficient, or do you expect things like >>= and **= to be available?

An overlooked PL question: what is easy to try in a given language? In lisp it's easy to try adding extra syntax. In Rust it's easy to try parallelism on iterators (rayon). Are there other examples? Perhaps Perl and regexes or Haskell and STM?