I'm impressed by how many options I'm offered in Common Lisp (in this case sbcl on Sly) for a simple error like an invalid variable name!
miniblog.
I still find it odd that non-OO languages use the term "object" in their docs. I've seen it in both C and Emacs Lisp.
Example: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3018.htm
Are there any languages that have both pattern matching and statement oriented syntax?
In principle these are orthogonal, but I'm struggling to think of a language with pattern matching that isn't expression oriented.
I'm super impressed that LLMs are scaling down and WebGPU is improving to the point that you can run a reasonable LLM in the browser! https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/16/web-llm/
In Python I can choose any name for my instance variable when defining a method. In practice people almost always use `self`.
Go has the same flexibility, but using other names for the instance is totally normal! https://gobyexample.com/methods
Every time I implement an interpreter with recursion, I regret it.
As soon as I want TCO, or userland control of stack limits, or resumable exceptions, I need my own stack.
This is awkward because it's an upfront design decision. Changing the stack model is a big refactoring.
Which programming languages follow the "cathedral" design philosophy, where they provide most of: the runtime, stdlib, debugger, LSP, test harness, code formatter and package manager?
Go, Dart and Smalltalk are the closest I can think of.
Having a conversation with a PDF is a really fun application of LLM technology: https://www.chatpdf.com/
I enjoyed this interview with Lukas Wirth, one of the maintainers of rust-analyzer: https://rustacean-station.org/episode/lukas-wirth/
I didn't realise how little code was shared between rustc and rust-analyzer (only lexing and type layouts). This makes it hard to track new Rust features.
I'm really impressed with this Rust error message: if you write %s instead of {} in your format string, it helpfully tells you that your syntax is wrong!
I'm a huge fan of languages that require you to explicitly export your functions (e.g. pub in Rust or export in JS).
It's much easier to change than a separate header file (.h in C, .mli in OCaml) and it enables local reasoning. You can see from the definition if it's exported.
Thoughtful article about building older software with Nix: https://blinry.org/nix-time-travel/
It's striking how a project that does so much excellent work on build reproducibility still has some build errors in this scenario. Bitrot is scary.
On teaching Haskell, and which parts of the semantics are tricky for newcomers: https://ciobaca.substack.com/p/pedagogical-downsides-of-haskell
It's funny how webkit-based browsers account an increasingly large proportion of users, but there's no similar trend in JS engines.
The JS implementation space seems to be much more diverse, at least in browsers.
One interesting property of both stdin/stdout based REPLs and RPC based REPLs is that they need to support asynchronous events.
In both these programs, I don't need to wait until the function is done to see the output printed. It's not sufficient to read-eval-wait-print-loop.
On how far programming language research has come, and the maturity of tools and techniques that make more ambitious projects viable: https://semantic-domain.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-golden-age-of-pl-research.html
@sidawson@mastodon.nz My bio says "a healthy dose of Emacs", which is ambiguous as to how big 🙃
Rich Hickey compares REPL design with RPC style nREPL: https://groups.google.com/g/clojure-dev/c/Dl3Stw5iRVA/m/IHoVWiJz5UIJ
Rich considers the nesting ability to be important. If the user is interacting with stdout/stdin, they can enter arbitrary other text UIs.
A fun example of Emacs composability: run spell check when you're viewing files, so you can fix typos in file names: https://mbork.pl/2023-01-30_The_benefits_of_everything_being_a_buffer
It's weird how many languages represent tests as functions. They rarely take arguments and very rarely (never?) call other tests.
Is it the right abstraction?
Showing 121-140 of 235 posts