programming

/programming553

The intersection of: hardware, software, languages, and systems.

TIL Prolog is extremely well suited for developing web applications.
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
https://transactional.blog/blog/2024-modern-database-hardware

Very excited for the future. I wonder how many new DB features will be implemented within the SSD.
Years ago I looked at HAMMER as an alt for ZFS. At the time it lacked features like compression. It looks like the default for Dragonfly BSD is now HAMMER2 -- which now has compression, dedup, etc.

tldr DragonFlyBSD is very interesting: https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/
Fun thought snack from SICP:

Allowing quotation in a language wreaks havoc with the ability to reason about the language in simple terms, because it destroys the notion that equals can be substituted for equals. For example, three is one plus two, but the word “three” is not the phrase “one plus two.” Quotation is powerful because it gives us a way to build expressions that manipulate other expressions (as we will see when we write an interpreter in [[Chapter 4]]). But allowing statements in a language that talk about other statements in that language makes it very difficult to maintain any coherent principle of what “equals can be substituted for equals” should mean. For example, if we know that the evening star is the morning star, then from the statement “the evening star is Venus” we can deduce “the morning star is Venus.” However, given that “John knows that the evening star is Venus” we cannot infer that “John knows that the morning star is Venus.”
https://www.jmeiners.com/lc3-vm/

Neat page on learning virtual machine fundamentals
Share your shell shortcuts
Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days

https://docs.scheme.org/tyscheme/

a lovely web site
Is this the best channel to discuss the design of new programming languages?

I was just kicked out of a subreddit I had helped build for years for trying to spark people to build new languages for diff/patch. I need a new PL watering hole!

https://x.com/breckyunits/status/1841990744237818031
i have little mnemonics that i've collected over the years that include:

css/margin values: pump up the bass & turn down the treble -> TRBL

dstat args: see ya later, nerd! -> dstat -cnrd

whatcha got?
I'm moderately tempted to read this

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-NT-Helen-Custer/dp/155615481X

I stopped using windows when I was 12 but it seems fun to explore the big ideas in NT.
I enjoyed this read / critique on E2EE systems:

https://www.devever.net/~hl/webcrypto
A New Way to Program in 1 Minute
What if GDPR mandated that cookies be a browser-level permission instead of a site-implemented permission modal?

Sure, the "approved uses" would still need to be done at the site level, but the "how do I just decline all?" UX problem & enforcement of it would be a lot simpler and safer and easier on sites & users.
In your opinion, what makes someone proficient in an aspect of programming? More precisely, what makes you think "I'm confidently knowledgeable about xyz"?
So much alpha in using a language with these safety properties.
Lately, I’ve been really enjoying the labs of the "great" course from CMU - "Introduction to Computer Systems". The quality of the material makes me wonder how much effort was put into this course! Cheers to the faculty for nurturing this great educational experience!
In regular programming, zero is false and anything else is true.

In ZK cryptography, zero is true and anything else is false.
Did you know that generative pretraining units were originally used for graphics?