Posts from 2016 - Wilfred miniblog

Brilliant demonstration of edebug-less debugging with lispy:

When I asked compiler engineers their views on parser generators, they said 'great for prototypes'. This seems to reflect common practice.

There's a learning code to lispy, but it has tons of lisp productivity boosters. E.g C-2 shows arglists inline!

Hotpatching functions in C: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/03/31/ (really impressive, shows a general, threadsafe approach!)

"Systems programming is programming where you spend more time reading man pages than reading the internet." https://kamalmarhubi.com/blog/2016/04/13/rust-nix-easier-unix-systems-programming-3/

I like that Emacs marks commands as potentially confusing, so it can warn you before getting into a funny/surprising state. Eg erase-buffer.

Fascinating, candid discussion of OpenBSD developers tuning kernel performance to speed up Firefox:

Not convinced metacircular interpreters are very helpful to for teaching. Implementing an interpreter in a different lang is more explicit.

"Writing a good indentation function can be difficult and to a large extent it is still a black art."

I've been reading the Simple Minded Indentation Engine docs today. It's impressively featureful, but not as simple as I expected.

Even in 2016, we're still exploring the best way to display CLI compiler errors. Some interesting iterations in Rust

Suppose you are 2x more productive in lang A than lang B. How much more popular (libraries, community) would B need to be for you to use it?

Different emoji fonts can radically affect interpretation: https://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-miscommunication-using-emoji/ (similar problems exist for ASCII smileys)

I've observed that you can increasingly substitute 'cloud' with 'technology' without any loss of precision.

Showing 631-645 of 922 posts