miniblog.

I had a third attempt at porting difftastic from Dijkstra to A*, and I've eventually concluded that A* just isn't worth it for the implementation complexity. I had fun writing it up though, and I've even attempted ASCII art for building intuitions:

JSON is too small (no comments) and YAML is too big (many string syntaxes, relatively few implementations). TOML is in the sweet spot for complexity, but I agree this syntax is by far the most confusing part. TOML 1.1 improves it at least:

"Minus 100 points", an article on deciding how to add features C#, remains one of the best introduction to PL design principles I've seen: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ericgu/minus-100-points (Design is hard, combinatorial complexity grows easily, saying "no" needs to be a default.)