14
Just released a new version of difftastic!
* Verilog support
* Improved Erlang, F#, Gleam, Pascal and Swift
* Better detection of binary files
miniblog.
3
I find it fascinating how some businesses have scheduled downtime for their websites (e.g. my electricity provider last weekend), but others don't.
I suspect it's primarily culture. You generally need to turn off electricity to do work, so your other tooling may reflect that.
72
Zig shipped a RISC-V backend before AArch64!
I think RISC-V is doing really well in the technology enthusiast community.
31
One cute feature of markdown I'd not noticed before: there's no syntax for images *without* a description (i.e. alt text).
31
When a tool supports both regular expressions and literal strings, which should be the default?
If you default to regex, users can match more strings than they realise (e.g. `foo.txt`) or less (e.g. `foo(bar)`).
I typically see regex as the default, but I prefer the opposite.
12
There are docs resources like https://diataxis.fr/ that categorise documents based on format and intended audience.
They don't say where you should start, or what order you should write docs.
I'm currently thinking README > reference > tutorial > how-tos. Agree/disagree?
144
I'm still tinkering with the website for my PL experiment. I want the styling to express "labour of love hobby project".
Choosing what program to show on the home page is really hard too. All the keywords are links like Racket.
What do you think?
43
I regularly see the phrase "all Xs are Ys, but not all Ys are Xs" in teaching material. Even material for children!
I have to re-read it every time. I very much prefer "Y is a more general category than X" or "X is a subset of Y".
Do people find this phrasing helpful, or is it poor pedagogy?
102
Over a sufficiently long time horizon, all code you write is legacy code.
5
I've written difftastic packaging instructions: https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/packaging_difftastic.html
The different distros have taken different approaches, so I'm trying to help with common gotchas — don't forget the man page!
Feedback welcome, especially if you've ever packaged something 🙂
7
The "line of death", where the browser UI splits between trusted UI elements and UI controlled by the website.
Also argues that HTTP warnings are better than HTTPS padlocks, because there's incentive to spoof padlocks lower on the page.
71
Further tinkering with diagnostics, following feedback!
* Two lines of context above and below now.
* The caret is included in the line below where possible.
* Syntax highlighting of keywords.
I kinda feel that smart context sizing would be better. What do you think so far?
65
I'm experimenting with diagnostics formatting.
* I've added a left margin, showing both the file name and line numbers
* I'm showing one line of context above/below the offending line.
* I'm using grey for comments.
What do you think? Is there anything you'd change?
6
Trying the nix CLI today, and I'm seriously impressed with the formatting of its --help output.
Indented warnings, italics, bullets, even adding a left border to code snippets! It's a nice reminder to take full advantage of terminal features to help the reader.
22
I've heard of 'blub languages', where you don't realise that other languages have better abstractions until you've experienced them.
I think the same thing happens with individual features. I've seen several C++ folks miss variadic generics in Rust, but I've not written enough C++ to feel it.
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