LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don’t get tired
Does this mean arguments against verbose "boilerplate" languages are going to be given less credence?
by porting ffmpeg to the zig build system, it becomes possible to compile ffmpeg on any supported system for any supported system using only a 50 MiB download of zig. For open source projects, this streamlined ability to build from source - and even cross-compile - can be the difference between gaining or losing valuable contributors.
Wirth himself realized the problems of Pascal and his later languages are basically improved versions of Pascal -- Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon. But these languages didn't even really displace Pascal itself let alone C -- but maybe if he had named them in a way that made it clear to outsiders that these were Pascal improvements they would have had more uptake.
Modula and Oberon should have been codenames rather than independent projects.
Messages are delineated by newlines. This means, in particular, that the JSON encoding process must not introduce newlines within a message. Note however that newlines are used in this document for readability.
Better still: separate messages by double linefeed (i.e., a blank line in between each one). It only costs one byte and it means that human-readable JSON is also valid in all readers—not just ones that have been bodged to allow non-conformant payloads under special circumstances (debugging).
Another way I get inspiration for research ideas is learning about people's pain points during software development Whenever I hear or read about difficulties and pitfalls people encounter while I programming, I ask myself "What can I do as a programming language researcher to address this?" In my experience, this has also been a good way to find new research problems to work on.
Also, for those who for some reason prefer curly brackets over Python-style indenting, it is also possible to write:
Good and sensible.
almost all beginners to RDF go through a sort of "identity crisis" phase, where they confuse people with their names, and documents with their titles. For example, it is common to see statements such as:- <http://example.org/> dc:creator "Bob" . However, Bob is just a literal string, so how can a literal string write a document?
This could be trivially solved by extending the syntax to include some notation that has the semantics of a well-defined reference but the ergonomics of a quoted string. So if the notation used the sigil ~ (for example), then ~"Bob" could denote an implicitly defined entity that is, through some type-/class-specific mechanism associated with the string "Bob".
Patch based systems are idiotic, that's RCS, that is decades old technology that we know sucks (I've had a cocktail, it's 5pm, so salt away).Do you understand the difference between pass by reference and pass by value?
Larry makes a similar analogy (pass by value vs pass by reference) to my argument about why patches are actually better at the collaboration phase—pull requests are fragile links. Transmission of patch contents is robust; they're not references to external systems—a soft promise that you will service a request for the content when it comes. A patch is just the proposed change itself.
how important is the concrete syntax of their language in contrast to
how important is the concrete syntax of their language in contrast to the abstract concepts behind them what I mean they say can someone somewhat awkward concrete syntax be an obstacle when it comes to the acceptance
The creators of Scrivener have taken a process that formerly had to be done manually by writers, and built a system of cues that make it easy and natural.
@stephen@social.stephenfry.com
This is where it starts getting ridiculous.
First, rather than social.stephenfry.com, stephenfry.com should be sufficient. Look at email. I can set my MX records to point wherever I want. I don't actually have to have a server with A records to field the email traffic.
Secondly, the @stephen part is superfluous, too! This is something where Mastodon et al had years (decades!) of hindsight to take care of this, and they still messed it up.
The LISP part, though, is not going well. Porting clever 1970s Stanford AI Lab macros written on the original SAIL machine to modern Common LISP is hard. Anybody with a knowledge of MACLISP want to help?
Want to animate navigations between pages? You can’t (yet). Want to avoid the flash of white? You can’t, until Chrome fixes it (and it’s not perfect yet). Want to avoid re-rendering the whole page, when there’s only a small subset that actually needs to change? You can’t; it’s a “full page refresh.”
an impedance mismatch, between what the Web is (infrastructure for building information services that follow the reference desk model—request a document, and the librarian will come back with it) versus what many Web developers want to be (traditional app developers—specifically, self-styled product designers with near 100% autonomy and creative control over the "experience")—and therefore what they want the Web browser to be (the vehicle that makes that possible, with as little effort as possible on the end of the designer–developer)
Because we didn’t have real marketing people, we updated the product to became more and more interesting to us, the developers, and less interesting to potential buyers.
an acknowledgement of network effects: LP is unlikely to ever catch on enough to be the majority, so there needs to be a way for a random programmer using their preferred IDE/editor to edit a "literate" program
This is part of the reason why I advocate for language skins for comparatively esoteric languages like Ada.
"Whether those slashes were forward slashes or back slashes didn't affect how the Web worked," he says, "but it does affect how other developers react to it