On "subsetting"
A quote, with some good insights about the evolution of (programming) languages If we were to follow Rich Hickey's advice, we'd only ever accrete our APIs, never removing old functions, never…
Programming
49 posts
Playing with Julia
Google Colab now supports Julia, so I gave it a spin Take a look here: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1t18zqNOqQujzn2czr-bMILf6vHhLxXtY?usp=sharing Then make your own! (I plan to use this…
On the ease of use for niche new languages
A programming language's ease of use has always been crucial. Rust and Elm used to stand out with their clear warnings and tips. I believe large language models (LLMs) like Claude and Llama3 are c…
A sobering blog rant
An engineering blog-post with a title like “the death of the junior developer”? Written by Steve Yegge? Gotta read it, right? Sourcegraph has their own chat assistant, Cody, but the point is more gen…
Copilots on the cheap
Didn’t realize just what it takes to start out with a programming assistant — expect prices to go up a lot later! Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this yea…
Programming in “Thonny”
We live in an age of abundance, in many respects. There are more ways to learn things than ever before. In my case, I was looking through options for my daughter to play around with. We previously…
On (No) Code
Couldn't have put it better: IMO the problem with low code is, that the hard part about solving most problems isn't usually the way you write or execute it. The hard part is avoiding weird e…
C++: "the good parts"
Herb Sutter has an interesting proposal The new “basic Hello-World with a single method call” would look something like: ``` main: () -> int = { hello("World\n"); } hello: (msg: _) =…
Books on Software Complexity
(from this HN thread) If only all posters collected their responses into a spreadsheet like this one did Here is the summary post (my preferences in bold): From my perspective, the top "must-r…
Extension Languages
Found this old post by Jon Skinner on why SublimeText went with Python. If you're building an application, then your users will get much more out of it if you given them a plugin API. For Sublime…
Simple web programming in Common Lisp (this time in Replit)
Use or fork this Replit instance…
Simple web programming (in Common Lisp)
It can be really simple. Stumbled across this ... ... and (yes, questionable aesthetics aside) decided to recreate it: Really does work as advertised: One-time stuff I had to run: (ql:quickload &…