miniblog.

@cstanhope Interesting, I didn't know that about Pascal! Go does make returning an accumulator a little more concise. Compare with e.g. Python: def foo(): res = [] # not needed in Go for x in y: if z: res.append(x) return res That's the biggest advantage I can see though.

@marcus_harrison Interesting approach! I believe Usenet clients took a similar approach. I'm not aware of anything newer though.

I think JSON vs XML is a strange dichotomy. Both can be processed by machines, but they're very different. I've seen XML work really well for dictionary data. You want to mark up text: A dog is a domesticated <group>animal</group>. In other words JSON : CSV :: XML : HTML.

I have a theory: Suppose I created a language Foo that printed execution time at termination: $ ./hello Hello World! (Finished in 0.6 seconds) I'm sure that Foo developers would be particularly sensitive to performance (for better and worse).

I've been revisiting a 5 year old Emacs mode I wrote: https://github.com/Wilfred/logstash-conf.el It's nice to see that I've learnt tons in that time! I've massively improved indentation performance, corrected syntax highlighting, and even added a test suite.

Page 36 of A History of Clojure has some interesting comments on things Rich would have done differently: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321 The very first item? Better errors! Clojure has improved significantly recently, but doing a good job here is hard (but important!) in any language.

Playing with GitHub actions today, and I realise how much testing services have become a commodity. I really appreciate GitHub's organised, collapsible UI for output. The featureset seems comparable to alternatives though. (The idea of an ecosystem of actions is tempting!)

Golang's "named return" is a pretty wild feature I haven't seen elsewhere. (The closest I know is &aux in Common Lisp.) Implicit `return` example: https://tour.golang.org/basics/7 or even modifying results before returning:

Porting some JS to typescript, I've been surprised at how many bugs it's highlighted. It's caught more issues than when I've done the same thing to Python code (adding mypy). I wonder why this is? I have three (complementary) theories:

I like that USB-C is symmetrical (you never have to flip it!) but could we take this idea further? I'd like my phone and tablet to have a power port at both ends, so it's easier to charge.

I've been enjoying using Jest to run my tests, using the workflow where it re-runs the files on any change. I wonder if it has the fuzzing/synthesis problem of running bad code though? I worry about writing `delete(".")` and it not waiting for me to finish `delete("./cache")`.

Typescript does a really good job with type aliases. I hover over a value and get `Parsimmon.Result<any>`. I then import Parsimmon but with the name P, and hover types are now `P.Result<any>`. I'm impressed.

I remain super optimistic about webassembly, but debugging tooling isn't yet mature, at least for Sentry's use cases. https://thenewstack.io/the-pain-of-debugging-webassembly/

I'm intrigued by Twitter's new features to control who responds to tweets, but I worry it would create a bunch of moderation work. For better or worse, 'anyone can respond' is a straightforward model.

TIL that GitHub has launched Discussions, a forum-like tool for repositories! https://github.blog/2020-05-06-new-from-satellite-2020-github-codespaces-github-discussions-securing-code-in-private-repositories-and-more/ Example thread: