miniblog.

Interesting discussion on HN regarding pervasive mutable state in Emacs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910475 easy to hack on, harder to make robust.

Plan 9's man page for Emacs is a little understated. (From https://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/emacs )

At worst, the mutability of Emacs promotes a spreadsheet level of s/w engineering. At best, it's a full-blown lisp machine with a fast CPU.

API Discovery: Can we do better? https://blog.apis.guru/api-discovery-can-we-do-better-2336706d5407 (Google provides more useful info when searching for restaurants than APIs!)

Using hosted cloud services does not absolve you of needing backups. Suppose you accidentally delete all your emails or tweets.

I'm intrigued by lobste.rs user sign up model. You need to be recommended by someone:

Porting a C codebase to Rust: https://bawk.space/2016/10/06/c-to-rust.html (would this be feasible for Emacs? Much of Emacs src/ is just platform support)

Emacs' advice system is like python decorators, but it's a first class entity. I wish ipython could say 'this function is decorated'.

Typing foo.<TAB> is an incredibly powerful way of exploring functionality in OOP libraries. Have any IDEs solved this for standalone fns?

Ability to remember code improves with experience https://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2016/11/17/ability-to-remember-code-improves-with-experience/ (experienced devs can 'chunk' and observe higher level patterns)

You can use Travis CI as an early warning system. Allow failures, but build against Rust nightly/Emacs trunk/etc and catch issues early.

Easily repeat Emacs functions https://zck.me/emacs-repeat-emacs-repeat (transient keybindings can be really convenient!)

I'm not sure if improving debugging skills means you face fewer problems. I seem to find progressively nastier problems over time.

"Anything is a soldering kit if you're brave enough!" https://twitter.com/layzellm/status/799999724623433728

Did you know that Emacs already supports tail-call optimisation in the bytecode interpreter? https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/92b3528cf3e6d366086e89b9a909f0c81614a064/src/bytecode.c#L662-L666 (me neither!)