A defence of Tumblr: https://theoutline.com/post/5811/why-tumblr-is-better-than-twitter-and-we-should-bring-it-back
The article contrasts Twitter with Tumblr and how Tumblr makes it harder for total strangers with diametrically opposed views to immediately respond to your content.
miniblog.
An underrated property of PHP: it strongly pushes you towards stateless code that leverages am external DB:
I used to think gradual type systems (mypy, flow, typed racket) were the sweet spot. They're super-powered linters that help with refactoring, but you can run the code at any point.
In a statically typed PL, you need the whole codebase to be well typed before you can run tests.
The io programming language is really pretty, but it's essentially f-expressions. I wonder what it would be like on a larger team, especially when you can add methods to add class at any point (just like Ruby).
Wow, LambdaMOO even has a little webserver inside! If you teleport to #90271, you can play scrabble and there's even an integrated web UI.
Common Lisp has 'make-instance', analogous to the 'new' keyword in Java: https://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_mk_ins.htm
I suspect the longer name shows that OO is less used in CL than Java: CL supports standalone functions and other paradigms.
Intriguing post by @Chis_Andrei exploring the use of unit tests to provide live examples of objects to demonstrate APIs. He even shows a notebook style UI and exploring related code!
Excellent article discussing the bytecode used to fit text adventure games on early PCs with tiny RAM: https://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm
ZIL was lisp-inspired, heavily optimised string storage (5.5 bytes per character!) and had some fun opcodes that were very specific to text games.
@cstanhope runkit: https://runkit.com/ is a notebook-style UI that has stronger reproducibility guarantees AIUI.
Jupyter is still exploring this space and I don't think there's a standard tool for enforcing reproducibility there.
In addition to 'sufficiently smart compiler', I've seen tech concepts that require a 'sufficiently smart UI' or even a 'sufficiently smart user'. These should be stigmatised too.
Teaching a new UI or abstraction sometimes shows that it's not ergonomic.
Fascinating introduction to early hyperlinks: there were 'linkbases' (storing links separately from the content), they weren't 1:1 (one link could point to multiple destinations) and had gossip protocols to update on other servers!
https://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci/2014/02/21/open-hypermedia-web/ https://edshare.soton.ac.uk/6158/1/Open_Hypermedia.pptx
Some great perspectives from JupyterCon: reproducible/explicit state is important, notebooks are replacing bash scripts in some workflows, and they're even used to introduce programming to total beginners!
Interestingly, I've reached a point where I get as many thoughtful responses to my content on Mastodon as I do on Twitter.
I agree it's very hard to make decentralised systems work, but my experience has been pretty positive.
A cute JS project that automatically instantiates controllers based on the HTML you've loaded, allowing you to easily add logic to pages using Turbolinks:
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