miniblog.

Ever wondered what the (interactive) function does at the C level of Emacs? It's just been ported in Remacs! https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/pull/1022/files

It's easy to use lots of different versions of Rust nightly. Remacs requires a specific version. The https://autogen.sh/ scripts are admirably defensive, to help you get on the right version!

I'm not sure about teaching OO in terms of shape hierarchies or animal species hierarchies. It might help intuition, but doesn't reflect typical usage IME. If you did model animals in an OO style, you'd be more likely to have base classes or interfaces like IFarmable, IHuntable.

There are technologies that are arcane, time consuming to learn, but extremely helpful to know. Have you encountered any that fit these criteria?

The latest Read Eval Print Love discusses rules engines! https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove004/read I'm also interested to learn that Clojure has a unification library in its stdlib.

There's a seedy underbelly of refactoring tools that work most of the time. For example, grep and sed can perform function renaming. For a small codebase, this works well (you can test or eyeball the result). Ideally we'd only use fully correct tools, but simplicity often wins.

Mid stack inlining in Go: https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/19348-midstack-inlining.md (Interesting implementation details: the inliner is AST based, how to preserve existing stack reflection APIs, and how to show good tracebacks.)

NLL (non-lexical lifetimes) now landing in Rust!

I've realised that the expression problem applies to docs just as much as code. E.g. for a PL, do you organise syntax highlighting docs with all editors together, or do you have a separate page for all relevant plugins of a single editor?

OH: Minecraft is the MUD of today's youth. This is a really interesting way of thinking about Minecraft! It certainly seems to be an outlet for all sorts of creative projects.

What does computing look like if we don't organise our functionality into programs that become OS processes? What paradigms have we not considered?

I love how smartphone web browsers will offer a handy option if your clipboard contains a URL. Saves two key presses! I wonder if there are other UIs that could be improved by considering the current clipboard context.

Ever thought that the AGPL was too weak and didn't encourage sharing source code? The SSPL is a viral copyleft license that requires you to share all the other software supporting your service! https://lwn.net/Articles/768670/ (I'm struggling to imagine anyone who would use this.)

Internet software decays: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/InternetSoftwareDecay (Software is dependent on the environment, and that's changing! You also have to stay on top of evolving security concerns.)

Tech skills missing in today's high school students interested in programming: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/10/31/ (And general purpose computing is becoming more niche! Don't buy a tablet without a Raspberry Pi too.)