miniblog.

Today I learnt that Haskell has *three* ways of changing what syntax means! Quasiquotation: https://wiki.haskell.org/Quasiquotation Template Haskell (like Lisp macros): https://wiki.haskell.org/Template_Haskell RebindableSyntax:

Bevy is a game engine written in Rust with a superb project introduction: https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing-bevy/ Videos! Clear rationale! A ton of examples with screenshots of the results!

Today I needed a library that takes a regular expression and gives you a string that matches. https://github.com/fent/randexp.js fits that need nicely. Unfortunately, reading the docs has introduced me to evil patterns like /a^/ and /\1 (a)/. Yikes.

Emacs 27, with harfbuzz for fonts, arbitrary sized ints, native JSON parsing, and portable dumping replacing unexec!

Clojure is changing how entry points are handled, with a default convention for command line arguments: https://insideclojure.org/2020/07/28/clj-exec/ Re-examining what the main function looks like is a really good exercise!

I loved playing Creatures 3, an ancient game (1999) with some basic neural nets. I'm surprised that ML isn't a bigger deal in virtual pets today!

Interesting to see that Swift has adopted checked exceptions: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/LanguageGuide/ErrorHandling.html I haven't seen many languages favour this feature after Java practices have gradually moved away from it.

I've realised the big advantage of teaching OO with physical analogies. It's well accepted that OO isn't just about modelling the eworld. Physical items are great for explaining subtyping. You can view types as subsets, and Ferrari <: Car <: Vehicle is intuitive.

Further optimising rustc, with a mix of direct performance work and improving the toolchain for benchmarking! https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2020/08/05/how-to-speed-up-the-rust-compiler-some-more-in-2020/

Code completion often assumes that there's nothing after the cursor. For example, when I'm writing CSS: padding-b|: 10px; I should still get completion for `padding-bottom`. This is a hard problem, but I've seen few IDEs handle this well.

My new go-to placeholder CSS colour is `teal`. It's way less garish than red or blue, and it's short to type.

Setting up my new SSD, and I've learnt that TRIM isn't always worthwhile on modern disks: https://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg40916.html

Emacs trick I've not seen before: press t in an edebug session! This pauses for one second at every stop point, effectively stepping for you automatically.

DigiKam 7 is out, including a much improved ML model for organising photos! https://www.digikam.org/news/2020-07-19-7.0.0_release_announcement/ Since using Google Photos, I've wanted this feature in all the photo apps I use.

On the typical lisp function taking more arguments than its Haskell analogue: