miniblog.

Superb article on the history of parsers, what approaches are used in industry (mostly hand-written recursive descent!) and the expressiveness of parser combinators and PEG. https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/timeline_v3
It's too easy to get excited about time tracking, tags, and literate programming when starting out with org-mode. It has a huge featureset. I'd encourage new users just to treat it as a better markdown-mode, and learn about folding and links, before diving in to the rest.
I'm very much enjoying this introduction to Slime on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B_4vhsmRRI It demonstrates many different features with clear explanations and a good working example.
The Mono C# REPL has this fun feature where you can override how any type is displayed:
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Enlightening article trying to verify leftpad (+2 other small functions) in a range of theorem provers: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/theorem-prover-showdown/
Glitch, the remarkable online website that lets you create, fork and run JS websites, is now open source! https://medium.com/glitch/glitch-opens-up-welcome-85c62d0d6e84
Arxiv is huge and I find it hard to find things relevant to my interests. Playing with https://scirate.com/ seems like a good solution: you can follow sections that interest you, and 'scite' (basically 'like') papers.
Here's a wonderful example of live programming in an introspectable system like Emacs. Emacs lets you customise ('advise') any function. Today I advised code evaluation! With a record of code snippets recently executed, I can make my code completion smarter.
Finding a security bug in CouchDB due to different JSON libraries interpreting repeated keys differently! https://justi.cz/security/2017/11/14/couchdb-rce-npm.html
Programming in the debugger: https://willcrichton.net/notes/programming-in-the-debugger/ Discusses how notebooks enable incremental program writing, and contrasts with REPLs. Makes some interesting points regarding persistence, although resumable exceptions have similar upsides too.
Grasshopper is a super cool app for teaching programming to novices. It combines elements of Logo (visual feedback) with a great little editor that works well on touch screens.
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Understanding surprising JS syntax by visualising the parse tree: https://ariya.io/2012/04/javascript-syntax-tree-visualization-with-esprima
One weakness of online discussion is protracted debates or arguments. What if commenting systems only allowed one comment per user? (Assuming a robust mechanism to prevent duplicate accounts.)
'Golden tests' are tests that deliberately save expected output to a file, to make them easy to examine or regenerate. https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-12-04-golden-tests I'm familiar with the concept, but it's nice to see a handy label for it.
If you're interested in alternative approaches to computing, I strongly recommend exploring the ideas in the Tunes project. There's a good overview here: https://transistorski.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/better-computing-pipe-dreams-with-tunes/
GitHub is exploring some really interesting editor designs with Xray: https://github.com/atom/xray/blob/master/README.md It uses CRDT to represent text (rather than rope data structures) and mixes web tech (primarily JS) with Rust to produce a design that's fast but still extensible.
Whilst I've seen many teams use monorepos successfully, it assumes that there's a common contribution process for everyone. A PL community needs to have different projects with different processes, and that requires packaging tooling. I wonder what the size upper bound is.
Thoughtful criticisms of git from the sqlite developers: https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html
Great introduction to the AV1 video codec, inter/intra frame compression, and exploiting correlations to save bytes: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/av1/demo1.shtml The Xiph posts are always good with great explanatory diagrams/sample pictures.
This is very cool: dynamically adjusting an Emacs theme based on the amount of ambient light: https://matthewbilyeu.com/blog/2018-04-09/setting-emacs-theme-based-on-ambient-light
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