Interesting Links for June 2024

“As I walk around Philadelphia I often converse with Benjamin Franklin, to see what he thinks about how things have changed since 1790.”

“The difficulty with music is that half of it is arbitrary and half of it is actually based on something, but you can’t tell the difference just by looking at it.”

“Defining the original paths for those letters was a very manual process of writing their positions into the code and then nudging the points back and forth until the letters looked right. When it came to coding cursive, I streamlined the process.”

“Are there deeper, more fundamental aspects of software that can help us think beyond surface-level matters? I’ve come to think that a triad of interacting factors best explains what software is and, by extension, why software is difficult.”

“Programs that manipulate other programs are powerful, interesting and fun. I’ll take you on a tour of how interpreters and compilers work, and explain a surprising computer science result which allows compilers to be generated automatically.”

“References are like jumps, leading wildly from one part of a data structure to another. Their introduction into high-level languages has been a step backward from which we may never recover.”

“Forsp kind of just appeared and then has continued to surprise me. In many ways it feels more fundamental than Lisp or Forth. It appears to be both simpler than Lisp and more powerful than Forth.”

“c4 is clever, tricky, fascinating, cool. It’s a compiler, it’s a VM, it’s an interpreter, it’s a parser, it’s art, it’s trickshot programming.”

“Lately I’ve been discovering new features in Python 3.12 around typing and pattern matching. Combined with dataclasses, they provide support for a style of programming that I’ve employed in Kotlin and Typescript.”

“Optics represent different relationships between types, such as ‘is a type of’, or ‘contains one or more’, similar to relationships in an old-timey UML class diagram. But unlike relationships in a UML diagram, optics can be used directly in real code.”

“Please don’t do this in production.”

“If Bob’s offering a perfect algorithm off the top of his head, call bullshit (unless he carefully frames it as a hypothesis to test in a simulator, thank you, Bob).”

“I just don’t think it’s useful, most of the time, to worry about anything beyond: wake me up, or don’t.”

“The internet is awash with tutorials on how to implement dark mode that will get you to a rudimentary implementation. I found that they lacked the refinements necessary to get to a great implementation.”

“Too often have I witnessed the improvising musician sweaty-handedly attempting to pinch-zoom an A4 pdf on a tiny mobile screen at the climax of a gig. We need fluid and responsive music rendering for the web!”