2025-03-tidbits.md

2025-03-28

clojure.spec - Rich Hickey - LispNYC 2016 - transcript

As you build larger systems, you realize that so much happens at run time, and so many things happen over wires. And there is sort of presumption in many languages that the type system is going to solve every problem. It is just not practical. There is the famous adage about every large C program has a little crappy Lisp implementation inside it. That is not my adage. That is an old one. But it does, and I used to write crappy Lisps inside C++ programs.

And after you have done that for a while, you realize: I am doing this because I do not have sufficient flexibility. My systems are large. I need them to be malleable. I cannot afford to change the whole world whenever some small thing changes.

So when you get to the dynamic edges of those programs, you end up doing this stuff. In Clojure, we do it this way all of the time. But there are still edges to our programs, and if you do something in the language that is just about the language, you run up against the wire, and then it stops helping you.
Agility & Robustness: Clojure spec - (video at youtube) - Stuart Halloway - Strange Loop 2016
- Austin Clojure Meetup Version of Talk - Stuart Halloway - Austin Clojure Meetup 2016
Clojure Spec: Expressing Data Constraints without Types - (video at youtube) - Alex Miller - Emerging Technologies Conference 2017

2025-03-27

Some More Books that Use Racket
- Animated Problem Solving - Marco T. Morazán
- Animated Program Design - Marco T. Morazán
- Programming-Based Formal Languages and Automata Theory - Marco T. Morazán

2025-03-26

2025-03-25

2025-03-24

Why do you say that static type systems are a "premature optimization"? - Hacker News discussion
- auggiesrose
  - FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
  - Annotated Version of Boole's Algebra of Logic 1847 - via archive.org
  - Archival Storage - David Rosenthal
  - Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer - Tibi Iorga
  - Why numbering should start at zero - E. W. Dijkstra Archive
  - The Calculated Typer
    
    We present a calculational approach to the design of type checkers, showing how they can be derived from behavioural specifications using equational reasoning.
Answer to "How to make a responsive and interactive image map using SVG" - Stack Overflow
- Answer to "How do I add alternative text to an object?" - Stack Overflow
- Answer to "Do I use <img>, <object>, or <embed> for SVG files? - Stack Overflow

2025-03-23

CS 450: Structure of Higher Level Languages - Tiago Cogumbreiro - Spring 2021
Netsec Return-Oriented Programming - Matthew Flatt
- Return-oriented programming Wikipedia Page

2025-03-22

How Data Abstraction changed Computing forever - Barbara Liskov - TEDxMIT
- A design methodology for reliable software systems - Barbara Liskov - 1972
Fresh variable Wikipedia Page

In formal reasoning, in particular in mathematical logic, computer algebra, and automated theorem proving, a fresh variable is a variable that did not occur in the context considered so far. The concept is often used without explanation.
Temporary symbol creation section of Hygienic Macro Wikipedia Page

In some programming languages, it is possible for a new variable name, or symbol, to be generated and bound to a temporary location. The language processing system ensures that this never clashes with another name or location in the execution environment. The responsibility for choosing to use this feature within the body of a macro definition is left to the programmer. This method was used in MacLisp, where a function named gensym could be used to generate a new symbol name. Similar functions (usually named gensym as well) exist in many Lisp-like languages, including the widely implemented Common Lisp standard and Elisp.

2025-03-21

Identifying and Correcting Programming Language Behavior Misconceptions - Kuang-Chen Lu - OOPSLA24
What Happens When Students Switch (Functional) Languages (Experience Report) - Kuang-Chen Lu - ICFP'23
annotatorjs.org

Annotation tools for the web. Select text, images, or (nearly) anything else, and add your notes.
On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages - Matthias Felleisen
- Expressiveness - portion from "Principles of Programming Languages" by Matthias Felleisen
  - Turing is Useless
  - The mechanical evaluation of expressions - Peter J. Landin - paper that introduces the term "syntactic sugar" (the original meaning of which may be a bit different from the current one?)
- Slides from CS 7194 at Cornell - CS 7194 (Spring 2019) Great works in Programming Languages

2025-03-20

Rhombus: A New Spin on Macros without All the Parentheses - Matthew Flatt - OOPSLA23
On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages - Shriram Krishnamurthi - PWLConf 2019

2025-03-19

Port of Emacs' just-one-space to DrRacket
Always Be Composing - Zach Tellman - Clojure/conj 2014
Firecracker

Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
"The Value of Values" transcript - Rich Hickey
Semilattice Wikipedia Page
- Partially ordered set Wikipedia Page
- Join and meet Wikipedia Page

2025-03-18

Ep 042: What does it mean to be 'data-oriented'? - Functional Design in Clojure
What is commutativity and why is it so useful in distributed systems? - Eric Normand

When you have distributed systems, one of the most costly, expensive things you can do between those nodes and the system is to communicate, so that you can coordinate.

You don't want to be waiting for each other. You don't want to be waiting for messages to travel across the network. The whole point is that you can work independently. [...]

We want to reduce the interdependence of the ordering of our operations. We want to make it so that the order the work gets done in doesn't matter. That's what commutativity is.
CRDT Wikipedia Page

To ensure eventual convergence the functions should fulfill the following properties: The merge function should compute the join for any pair of replica states, and should form a semilattice with the initial state as the neutral element. In particular this means, that the merge function must be commutative, associative, and idempotent. The intuition behind commutativity, associativity and idempotence is that these properties are used to make the CRDT invariant under package re-ordering and duplication.
Applications of Continuations - Daniel P. Friedman
The Rhombus Programming Language Home Page
- Shubbery Notation

2025-03-17

markdown editors - because working with gists for content that gets longer is terrible
- markdown-mode - emacs mode, not as pretty, but seems to work better than alternatives tested below
- ghostwriter - dark mode out-of-the-box, but handling of links to local files not so great?
- ReText - no issue with links, but dark mode doesn't work here
- Marker - A gtk3 markdown editor - mostly good except problems with navigating to local files?
Tidy Data - Hadley Wickham
sherpa-onnx

Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, speaker diarization, speech enhancement, and VAD using next-gen Kaldi with onnxruntime without Internet connection. Support embedded systems, Android, iOS, HarmonyOS, Raspberry Pi, RISC-V, x86_64 servers, websocket server/client, support 11 programming languages
Netsec Tools for Executables - Matthew Flatt

2025-03-16

Smooth, iterative deepening - Niko Matsakis

The idea is that a user’s first experience should be simple–they should be able to get up and going quickly. As they get further into their project, the user will find places where it’s not doing what they want, and they’ll need to take control. They should be able to do this in a localized way, changing one part of their project without disturbing everything else.

Smooth, iterative deepening sounds easy but is in fact very hard. Many projects fail either because the initial experience is hard or because the step from simple-to-control is in fact more like scaling a cliff, requiring users to learn a lot of background material. Rust certainly doesn’t always succeed–but we succeed enough, and I like to think we’re always working to do better.
Why getters and setters are terrible - Eric Normand
What is a calculation? - Eric Normand - some operations that don't have side-effects are not functions in some languages (e.g. + in javascript), having a term that can capture these types of things along with pure functions might be less confusing...hence "calculation"