miniblog.

Thought-provoking article: scale OS software by corporate backing, or monetise PR review, as merging PR labour is scarce! https://twitter.com/nayafia/status/906953748143935489

Interesting SO topic on writing a good hash function for ints: https://stackoverflow.com/q/664014/509706 (tricky to handle ints divisible by a common factor)

Shower thought: are tuples less useful in PLs where the type system encodes the length of lists?

Interesting library for infix syntax in Common Lisp: https://github.com/rigetticomputing/cmu-infix (ironically I find it tricky to read,but I blame unfamiliarity)

Comment sorting is hard. Using points, content deteriorates as you approach the bottom. When should you stop reading?

Another really interesting feature of PIT: weight coverage based on how many calls required to reach the code!

Java is also exploring a train based release model! https://mreinhold.org/blog/forward-faster (I don't envy the complexity of releasing a PL with huge usage)

Pitest is a nifty mutation testing tool. It focuses on mutating expressions covered by unit tests, maximising speed!

I'd like autoformatters to make more elaborate changes than just indentation. Convert for loops to map, or inline trivial helper functions!

I frequently see blocks compared with anonymous functions, but they're not equivalent. In a block, you can return from the enclosing func.

helpful.el now links to the manual if a symbol is documented there! I've wanted this for ages -- discoverability!

Smalltalk With Style, a book showcasing Smalltalk best practices, is now freely available! https://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/WithStyle/SmalltalkWithStyle.pdf

I will be attending @strangeloop_stl this year! I'm really excited for the talks and the variety of PL perspectives the attendees bring.

Nifty Emacs package of the day: beginend: https://github.com/DamienCassou/beginend (makes M-< much more useful, allowing moving to move places)

A useful reminder that TIOBE is extremely approximate!