A strong open source culture makes a big difference in how much fun a PL is IME. Exotic PLs (eg kdb) are interesting regardless of culture.
miniblog.
Rust 1.16 has a slew of compiler usability improvements: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/03/16/Rust-1.16.html (IMO rustc is pushing the state of the art in some cases!)
Julia is changing its keywords to make semantics more obvious and to encourage immutability: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/psa-new-keywords-for-defining-types/2029
Look at all the "moved from $PL1 to $PL2" blog posts, build a matrix, and predict future PL popularity! https://erikbern.com/2017/03/15/the-eigenvector-of-why-we-moved-from-language-x-to-language-y.html
Overall I find a lisp-1 nicer to work with, but sometimes (funcall f) is nice and explicit. (f) is rather subtle in a paren-heavy language.
Great post on using EIEIO in BBDB in elisp: https://ericabrahamsen.net/tech/2016/feb/bbdb-eieio-object-oriented-elisp.html (whilst CLOS is common in CL, EIEIO usage is rare IME)
In principle you can create wrapper types in any PL, eg Path(Str) for filesystem functions. I only see it used w/ static types in practice.
Julia is wonderful. Gradual typing, multimethods, and the best default REPL I've ever seen. Performance is extraordinary too.
π in Julia is not just a Float64 constant. It's evaluated to the accuracy required of the type you're using! https://julialang.org/blog/2017/03/piday
One Emacs user has filed ~2000 bugs, 5x the next most prolific user! https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-03/msg00222.html (also contains OS, distro and arch popularity)
Enforcing that globals are assigned first in Lua: https://metalua.luaforge.net/src/lib/strict.lua.html (💪 metaprogramming, something I normally associate with slow PLs)
GitHub Flavoured Markdown now has a formal spec as a superset of CommonMark! https://githubengineering.com/a-formal-spec-for-github-markdown/
Lua treats nil and false as falsy values, but not 0 (unlike python and JS). So little agreement as to what should be falsy!
Lektor is an interesting mix of Jekyll and Wordpress functionality: a Wordpress-style editor but outputs static HTML https://www.getlektor.com/docs/what/
Understanding and using SAT solvers: A practitioner perspective https://resources.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/rg1/conferences/vtsa09/slides/leberre1.pdf
Detecting Android malware by extracting a static call graph and applying ML https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/03/09/mamadroid-detecting-android-malware-by-building-markov-chains-of-behavorial-models/ (impressive how high-level the CFG is)
BuzzFeed is exploring a comments tool that deliberately shows opposing views https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/helping-you-see-outside-your-bubble (trying to prevent a filter bubble!)
ez-query-replace is now even smarter, and has screenshots! https://github.com/Wilfred/ez-query-replace.el #emacs
TIL an obscure git flag: --intent-to-add. Adds an empty file at a given path, so you can see new files as diffs: https://stackoverflow.com/q/24329051/509706
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