miniblog.

I miss the usize type when I'm not coding in Rust. I find distinguishing between 'an integer representing a quantity' and 'an integer representing an array index' to be very helpful sometimes.

org-mode has a lovely high level introduction, with basic usage, screenshots, and a few pointers on more advanced features:

Elixir 1.6 introduces a code autoformatter, reformats the entire stdlib, and adds an elegant pattern match syntax for defining breakpoints!

Git is rather timid with merge conflicts. If you change two adjacent lines, it assumes they conflict! https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/194788/why-doesnt-git-merge-adjacent-lines-without-conflict In my experience they don't, and it causes problems when library imports change at the top of the file. Interestingly, Subversion happily merges.

Writing setq in Rust for Remacs! https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/pull/600 Today I learnt that (setq) is legal Emacs lisp.

Regular expressions being greedy seems like a bad default. They tend to work fine on small inputs but capture too much on larger inputs. Too late to change in most situations though.

I see mypy more as a refactoring tool, but I'm always pleasantly surprised when it catches issues. It caught a bug here! demo.py:96: error: Unsupported operand types for >= ("int" and "Optional[int]") (In the code I've checked max_val is not None, but used min_val.)

When I look at tools like Tor and other strong anonymity tools, the complexity is daunting. Only one mistake and suddenly you've outed yourself. I used to suspect that strong anonymity is essentially impossible, but Satoshi Nakamoto has demonstrated otherwise. Remarkable.

What Developers Want and Need from Program Analysis: An Empirical Study https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ase-2016.pdf Static analysis tools should have very few checks enabled by default, and great editor integration!

jq is an awesome tool for manipulating big blobs of JSON, which are increasingly common outputs from dev tools. Today I learnt that jq even supports TCO! Impressive!

How would you describe the architecture of real-world compilers? https://mrale.ph/blog/2015/03/29/browser-as-an-interactive-disassembler.html sums it up as a structure that should be treated as a black box until you know your way around!

Defining if, cond and progn in Rust in Remacs! https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/pull/598 The lispiest code I've read in ages :)

Whilst nil and t are rather strange as booleans, they're wonderfully easy to type. I've finally relented and written a yasnippet for Python because True and False are just too many keystrokes.

.@rgrinb I really enjoyed your blog post on load-path in Emacs! https://rgrinberg.com/posts/emacs-search-load-path/ I'm impressed and intrigued to see you use el-search. What kind of searches have you done with it?

As a developer, what affects your reaction to new libraries or tools? When do you react "ooh, this is new and neat!" and when do respond "argh, this is new and different"?