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. emilymstark.com/2022/12/18/dea…

I've written difftastic packaging instructions: difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/packaging_diff… 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 🙂

Over a sufficiently long time horizon, all code you write is legacy code.

In many ways, Oberon is very different from Lisp: ALGOL syntax, static typing, no real object system, no GC, no user metaprogramming, etc. In other ways, Oberon is very Lisp-like: whole-system language (including hardware co-design and GUI in the early 1980s), minimalist, etc.

I'm still tinkering with the website for my PL experiment. I want the styling to express "labour of love hobby project". Choosing what to program to show on the home page is really hard too. All the keywords are links like Racket. What do you think? garden-lang.org

There are docs resources like 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?

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.

One cute feature of markdown I'd not noticed before: there's no syntax for images *without* a description (i.e. alt text).  spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#images

Zig shipped a RISC-V backend before AArch64! I think RISC-V is doing really well in the technology enthusiast community. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442222…

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.

Just released a new version of difftastic! * Verilog support * Improved Erlang, F#, Gleam, Pascal and Swift * Better detection of binary files github.com/Wilfred/diffta…

I'm still experimenting with UIs for live (sandboxed) evaluation of tests. I've realised that you really want to highlight the failing assertion, not just the failing test. Feedback welcome :)

I'm changing method definition syntax in my language: // old fun (this: Int) inc(): Int { this + 1 } // new method inc(this: Int): Int { this + 1 } The original syntax was inspired by Go, but the new syntax is more grep-friendly and perhaps more readable. Thoughts?

One nice feature of cargo that I wasn't previously aware of: you don't need to do anything after updating your Cargo.toml. In npm, you need to remember to `npm i` after changing package.json. It's not declarative and the state can get out of sync.

Playing with optional type signatures in Python, I realise that the return type is the most important to me. I'd much rather have a function with only a return type instead of a function with only parameter types. It's often quick to add too.

Playing with Claude and my new programming language has made me add features that it wants. I think they're reasonable. `for method in methods` -- custom syntax error explaining that `method` is a reserved word `echo 'println("hello world") | garden` -- eval snippets from stdin

I've started keeping a list of particularly interesting bugs and patches that I've worked on: github.com/Wilfred/intere… The time that I once removed *a single closing paren* in Emacs is still my favourite.

I'm experimenting with syntax in examples. I don't really like Rust's `assert(inc(1) == 2)` syntax, I find it a little distracting. I'm trying `inc(1) //-> 2`. The comment is rendered differently, and there's nothing before the sample code. What do you think?

The Matter protocol is excellent for puns. "Does it Matter? It doesn't Matter."

Today I learnt that Racket intentionally doesn't have a traditional REPL workflow. The authors were concerned about students not understanding the state between the current session and the code on disk. (Arguably Jupyter has some of these features now.) blog.racket-lang.org/2009/03/the-dr…