I'm a fan of the Software Unscripted podcast, and I particularly enjoyed this recent episode about CrowdStrike and security culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzjaZssBEiI
The guest (Kelly Shortridge) compares attackers to lawyers trying to find loopholes. This is such a great analogy.
miniblog.
One interesting design choice in Emacs that I haven't seen in other editors: reserved shortcuts.
An Emacs extension shouldn't use F5 through F12, or Ctrl-c LETTER. This lets users configure their own shortcuts. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Key-Bindings.html
Does it exist elsewhere? I miss it in VS Code, where e.g. all the Fn keys are already assigned.
One interesting design choice in Emacs that I haven't seen in other editors: reserved shortcuts.
An Emacs extension shouldn't use F5 through F12, or Ctrl-c LETTER. This lets users configure their own shortcuts. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Key-Bindings.html
Does it exist elsewhere?
Really cute approach to reporting type errors: when there's a type error, show an example of a runtime error that the type check has prevented!
Data-Driven Techniques for Type Error Diagnosis https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59s4h4pv
Difftastic has been cited in a paper!
Modernizing SMT-Based Type Error Localization https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09034
The authors use difftastic to work out which parts of a buggy program have actually changed, a great use case :)
LLMs are a really accessible machine learning technique. I dabbled with text classifiers a few years ago and the APIs were way more involved.
(system_prompt: String, input: String) -> String
I can prototype with this much more easily!
Bootstrapping a language can be immensely satisfying.
I've added the ability to define stub types in the Garden stdlib and suddenly I don't need to special-case Int or String! They're just normal type declarations.
I'm a huge fan of Swift's 'Error Handling Rationale' design document: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/blob/9315673c003875158852579bd1f33480cdec5461/docs/ErrorHandlingRationale.md#fundamentals
It carefully defines terminology and compares with other languages, so you can understand Swift's position and preference in the design space.
I'm having fun writing a simple type checker, but I'm learning firsthand why syntax-directed checking doesn't work. It prevents inference.
My checker catches real bugs, but it can't handle cases like this:
[1, 2].map(fun(x) { x + 1; })
I think I need bidirectional checking.
I've been experimenting with an 'evaluate up to cursor' mode for my PL project.
I love evaluating self-contained snippets in Lisp, this generalises the idea.
The interpreter remembers the arguments when you run tests, then can re-use them when you say 'eval up to here'.
What do you think?
Today I learnt that Emacs 28 shipped a context-menu-mode! https://oylenshpeegul.gitlab.io/blog/posts/20230129/
This seems quintessentially Emacs: deeply hackable, but building UI features in an order very different to the mainstream.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools => Competence trumps process
Working software over comprehensive documentation => Minimize time from program launch to deployment of simplest useful functionality
I really like the DoD's phrasings of classic agile maxims:
Has anyone built a great solution to 'run all my unit tests automatically'?
It's straightforward to write a while loop in bash, but handling timeouts, syntax errors etc well is hard.
Running on save would be good, although I wonder if you could run fast tests on each keystroke.
New version of difftastic is out!
* Fixed a nasty crash that was relatively common
* Minor display and performance fixes
I've had a new Linux laptop for several weeks and only just realised that I didn't have `man` installed!
Google is my default the vast majority of the time, and this seems to confirm it.
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