miniblog.

Every browser has its own distinct URI schema for the "Reader View"!

I love the idea of mutation testing, but changing my code in arbitrary ways, then running it, is scary. Many PLs don't have a good sandbox available.

Microsoft rather enthusiastically reminds you about its browser when you search for alternatives! Seems odd for a product that produces no revenue for them.

@DPD_UK I have a parcel that was supposed to be signed for. I wasn't in, and I don't know anyone called Garden. The parcel is not present. Can you advise?

Cute project translating all the keywords of JS, to help programmers where English isn't their first language: https://fhtr.org/js-i18n/ (looks like a proof of concept though)

This is a sign of a great text editor community: when you see an idea elsewhere, you explore it and see if you can achieve the same advantages! https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/88b51s/putting_the_i_back_in_ide_jane_sts_emacsbased/dwkwcg9/ (Tarsius has lots of valuable opinions on VCS integration with editors, of course.)

Rather than opting-in to git blame, it would be nice if IDEs showed metadata on the current function by default. It'd be really valuable to know "this function is frequently modified" or "this function has had N distinct authors". It would help your intuitions about the code.

Sometimes it's a real pain that JSON doesn't support comments. One positive consequence is that 'npm install' is always able to programmatically add new entries. Cargo's TOML is much harder to edit in a way that preserves comments, though solutions now exist.

I spent a while implementing a pretty-printer in elisp, only to realise that ielm already has a fine pretty-printer. Turns out that pp-to-string is built-in to Emacs! (I missed this initially because of the short name: I only found cl-prettyprint.)

A bit of humour in sample code makes a great first impression on your new users! This example is from

An impressive range of features have landed in IntelliJ 2018.1: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/specials/idea/whatsnew.html A ton of additional lints, but also some interesting completion features: using isInstace to infer types, and also leveraging JSON schema!

Really exciting to hear that Go is moving towards a package management tool! https://blog.golang.org/versioning-proposal It's also interesting that they've taken a different path to the npm/cargo school of thought, with a clearly explained rationale.

Fair criticism of Jupyter Notebooks, and how hard it is to apply good software engineering: https://medium.com/@alexander.mueller/5-reasons-why-jupyter-notebooks-suck-4dc201e27086 It's hard to transition from code in a notebook to standalone program or reusable library in my experience. I think a less stateful design would really help.

Interesting article on the cognitive burden of programming language features, and how it incentivises designs that are similar to today's popular languages: https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/programming_languages_and_the_speed_of_light.html

Rust is adding a new type for pointers to data that can't move! https://github.com/withoutboats/rfcs/blob/pin-and-move/text/0000-pin.md This is useful in lots of situations: dealing with FFI/GC in other language runtimes, self references, amongst others.