miniblog.

If you created a large, successful OSS project, would you want to be BDFL or move on after a period? I see tradeoffs on both sides, although it's not a decision I've needed to make myself.

Every time I implement an interpreter with recursion, I regret it. As soon as I want TCO, or userland control of stack limits, or resumable exceptions, I need my own stack. This is awkward because it's an upfront design decision. Changing the stack model is a big refactoring.

A significant part of development practice is trying to work out "should I manually change this, or should I write a complex editor macro / sed/awk script / program using an AST and refactoring library?". It's easy to make the wrong decision in both directions IME.