Somehow, a lot of interesting stuff this month:
- For Emacs enthusiasts, version 26.1 is out, with support for generators and threads
- A new fundamental particle (?!)
- You probably didn’t know this about OOP
- Ryan Dahl gives a critical review of Node
- I like to catch up with “Uncle Bob” from time to time, here he is talking about Clean Architecture
- Came across an old post by Kent Pitman (bit over 20 years now!) with something I liked
Anyway, I know what it is to look at functionality and duplicate it elsewhere. It CAN be done. I am not saying it can’t. What I’m saying is that it has not been done, and it’s a crying shame. Few people even know there ever WAS a lisp machine, and those who do are mostly not rich enough personally to invest the time to duplicate what was there. Many people spent a big chunk of their lives investing in this dream and it didn’t pan out quite as we wish. Ok. Sometimes other events win out–not always even for the right reasons. Or at least for the reasons you wish. But don’t add insult to injury to say that the losers in battles such as these had nothing to offer.
Common Lisp beat out Interlisp, and maybe for good reasons but it doesn’t mean Interlisp had nothing to offer–some very good ideas got lost in the shuffle and I don’t pretend that Common Lisp just obviously had a better way. Java is going to beat out Smalltalk perhaps, but that doesn’t mean Java is better than Smalltalk. We owe it to the losers in these little
skirmishes to make sure that, if nothing else, the good ideas are not lost along with the framework. And we do not accomplish that by defining that there was nothing lost. That’s both callous to those who worked hard on these other things and short-sighted to the future, which might one
day care about the things that got lost.
- Exploring the code of the 1996 PC game Diablo (for those of you who remember it 🙂)
- If you like that sort of stuff … a look at the new algebraic effect system in Ocaml
- Maybe every gene affects every trait?
- A breakthrough in determining problems in BQP but not in NP (PH, but same difference)
- How Clang compiles a function
- Quicksort in Idris (what am I even looking at here?)
- Finally, on the early images of the moon, how they were really good, and the surprising tech behind it all
Abacus Noir 