A dedicated blog instance for links

I decided to separate normal posts and links posts into two separate blog instances: blog and linkage.

(defvar +my-blogs+
  '((blog . ((org-static-blog-publish-title . "Stefano Rodighiero — Stream")
             (org-static-blog-publish-url . "https://stefanorodighiero.net/blog/")
             ;; ... and so on ...
             ))
    (linkage . ((org-static-blog-publish-title . "Stefano Rodighiero — Linkage")
                (org-static-blog-publish-url . "https://stefanorodighiero.net/linkage/")
                ;; ... and so on ...
                ))))

(defun select-active-blog (blog-name)
  (interactive (list (intern (completing-read "Select active blog for publication: "
                                              (mapcar #'car +my-blogs+)))))
  (let ((blog-options (cdr (assoc blog-name +my-blogs+))))
    (message "Setting active blog: %s" blog-name)
    (dolist (option-name (mapcar #'car blog-options))
      (set option-name (cdr (assoc option-name blog-options))))))

(advice-add 'org-static-blog-publish :before (lambda (&rest args)
                                               (call-interactively 'select-active-blog)))

Pain

On Language Learning

the appeal of this project was again the immense pain, in this case of making any sense of a text which would give me headaches even in my native language

The Muse

The Muse

From Ron Gilbert's blog.

"The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don't wait for her. Start alone." - Roger Ebert

One of my favorite quotes and one I keep needing to remind myself of. No matter how blocked or stuck I am, if I just force myself to start writing or designing, it's not long before the ideas start flowing.

Alfred Wainwright

Alfred Wainwright

A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells is a series of seven books by A. Wainwright, detailing the fells (the local word for hills and mountains) of the Lake District in northwest England. Written over a period of 13 years from 1952, they consist entirely of reproductions of Wainwright's manuscript, hand-produced in pen and ink with no typeset material.

Lemonodor

I am going through old Lemonodor's posts, because why not. It's a treasure trove of interesting material (and also a testament to the fact Internet content is more ephemeral than one could think of)

• How to Interview a Programmer
• Advanced Programming Language Features for Executable Design Patterns

Birches

by Joaquim Vancells

Fun with Fonts

Fun with Fonts

Quoted in a profile of Donald Knuth published on NYTJ.

Over the past decade, we have designed six typefaces based on mathematical theorems and open problems, specifically computational geometry. These typefaces expose the general public in a unique way to intriguing results and hard problems in hinged dissections, geometric tours, origami design, computer-aided glass design, physical simulation, and protein folding. In particular, most of these typefaces include puzzle fonts, where reading the intended message requires solving a series of puzzles which illustrate the challenge of the underlying algorithmic problem.

Capital Sharp S in German orthography

Mark Dominus points to an article from typography.guru: The Capital Sharp S in now part of the official German orthography.

I would be supposed to be learning German but as of today my exposure is still quite limited. I think the only times when I see the letter ß is when reading street signs.

The Utter Failure of Fictional Time Travel

The Utter Failure of Fictional Time Travel

Perhaps the reason is that no one has (ever) solved the spatial problem, and the cosmos is littered with time travelers adrift between the stars and galaxies.

USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection

USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection

The USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection documents fruit and nut varieties developed by growers or introduced by USDA plant explorers around the turn of the 20th century. Technically accurate paintings were used to create lithographs illustrating USDA bulletins, yearbooks, and other series distributed to growers and gardeners across America.

Kudos to my teacher from last summer watercolor lessons for finding this pearl.

The Oldest Board Game

The Oldest Board Game

Which mathematicians were known for their ability to teach?

Which mathematicians were known for their ability to teach?

Atreus firmware + Ragel logic

Atreus firmware + Ragel logic

Excellent content on the Atreus mailing list. An user shows how he used Ragel state machine compiler to implement the logic of his Atreus' controller. Impressive and very interesting.

Why I (don't) hate LaTeX

Why I (don't) hate LaTeX

(via ariis' stream)

I understand and I can sympathize with the nuisances the author mentions (the error messages!), but I do not hate LaTeX.

I use LaTeX for practically everything I need to print. Actually, for most of the things I use org-mode, using its exporter later to obtain a LaTeX or a PDF document – via LaTeX, again – when needed. When I don't need anything special, it's good enough. And it's all plain text, which is also good.

When I need something special, I can thrown in some packages doing the work for me. If I need something very special, well, it might lead me to swearing and tears and whatnot, but I know at the end I'll have something largely more manageable than any other system I know could give me.

Lisp is the greatest single programming language ever designed

Another insightful post by Alan Kay on Quora:

One of our many problems with thinking is “cognitive load”: the number of things we can pay attention to at once. The cliche is 7±2, but for many things it is even less. We make progress by making those few things be more powerful.

Record Keeping

Record Keeping

Why Catholics Built Secret Astronomical Features Into Churches to Help Save Souls

Why Catholics Built Secret Astronomical Features Into Churches to Help Save Souls

Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

The Case Against TODO

The Case Against TODO

IRCv3

IRCv3

The IRCv3 Working Group is a collection of IRC client and server software authors working to enhance, maintain and standardize the IRC protocol using backwards-compatible extensions.

A history of storage media

A history of storage media Kiran Bhattaram published a very interesting piece about how storage evolved in computing.

Emacs Lisp's Future

Emacs Lisp's Future A thread from two years ago reemerged

"Finding most frequent element in a list"

A question on Stackoverflow and a brief search led me to some thoughts I want to register to document my learning experience.

I've been searching for a while for a function that does this in (Common) Lisp. Does one already exist, or do I need to code it on my own? To be more specific, I'm looking for a function that if I fed it in something like '(1 2 4 1), it would return 1?

First of all, the request specifics are incomplete: what should the function return if there's more than one element that occur most frequently? What is the notion of sameness among the elements of the list?

As a beginner, I often find myself looking for idiomatic ways to do things: reusing code in a package is apparently the way to go, but I haven't found a clear path yet for such researchs: I usually look for something in Quicklisp package collection, then on github and the Clwiki. I suspect that, at least for these simple functions, CL makes it so easy to roll your own version that everybody end up writing a homemade solution.

A-LANG: ways to implement computer languages on 6502s

A-LANG: ways to implement computer languages on 6502s

The Classics of Science Fiction

The Classics of Science Fiction

Surprising reasons to use a syntax-coloring editor

Surprising reasons to use a syntax-coloring editor

Mark Jason Dominus on syntax higlighting.

Syntax highlighters should be highlighting the semantic content like expression boundaries, implied parentheses, boolean subexpressions, interpolated variables and other non-apparent semantic features. I think there is probably a lot of interesting work to be done here. Often you hear programmers say things like “Oh, I didn't see the that the trailing comma was actually a period.” That, in my opinion, is the kind of thing the syntax highlighter should call out. How often have you heard someone say “Oh, I didn't see that while there”?

Bit Twiddling Hacks

Bit Twiddling Hacks

Darius Bacon

Oh good lord I found again a web page I was used to peruse like 20 years ago. Many journeys started from there. It's the personal homepage of Darius Bacon.

The Early History of Smalltalk

The Early History of Smalltalk

Alan Kay's reading list

Alan Kay's reading list

(reproducing it here for archive)

So you want to be a compiler wizard

So you want to be a compiler wizard

Nowadays, we do programming by poking

http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206 https://vimeo.com/151465912#t=59m36s

Today, this is no longer the case. Sussman pointed out that engineers now routinely write code for complicated hardware that they don’t fully understand (and often can’t understand because of trade secrecy.) The same is true at the software level, since programming environments consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. According to Sussman, his students spend most of their time reading manuals for these libraries to figure out how to stitch them together to get a job done. He said that programming today is “More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?'”. The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant. Nowadays, we do programming by poking.

Dyson's Dodecahedron

Dyson's Dodecahedron A nice collection of hand-drawn RPG maps

Isabella the Catholic brings change to Chess

Isabella the Catholic brings change to Chess

Org as a Word Processor

Org as a Word Processor

"Learning Racket" series

"Learning Racket" series An expert programmer learns Racket and takes notes in the process. Many interesting remarks, for example (after discovering a library that let the user bend the language):

It must be any language designer's ultimate dream.

(And this is probably Lisp's greatest weakness as well – with this level of possible diversity, everyone has to use the “common lowest denominator” simply because nobody can agree on what alternative syntax / library / etc. is better and should be used.)

eshell and why can't I convert to you

eshell and why can't I convert to you Some interesting Emacs shell tricks in this Reddit thread.

The Lisp Curse

The Lisp Curse

Interesting read, that resounds with something we were talking about at last Haskell meetup.

Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.

Consider the case of Scheme, again. Since making Scheme object-oriented is so easy, many Scheme hackers have done so. More to the point, many individual Scheme hackers have done so. In the 1990s, this led to a veritable warehouse inventory list of object-oriented packages for the language. The Paradox of Choice, alone, guaranteed that none of them would become standard. Now that some Scheme implementations have their own object orientation facilities, it's not so bad. Nevertheless, the fact that many of these packages were the work of lone individuals led to problems which Olin Shivers wrote about in documenting the Scheme Shell, scsh.

What are some of the must-read, harder Sci Fi books you all recommend?

What are some of the must-read, harder Sci Fi books you all recommend?

Farewell, Marvin Minsky (1927–2016)

Farewell, Marvin Minsky (1927–2016)

Especially interesting is what Minsky observes about teaching programming languages:

I remember a few years ago bringing up the topic of teaching programming, and how I was hoping the Wolfram Language would be relevant to it. Marvin immediately launched into talking about how programming languages are the only ones that people are expected to learn to write before they can read. He said he’d been trying to convince Seymour Papert that the best way to teach programming was to start by showing people good code. He gave the example of teaching music by giving people Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and asking them to transpose it to a different rhythm and see what bugs occur. (Marvin was a long-time enthusiast of classical music.) In just this vein, one way the Wolfram Programming Lab that we launched just last week lets people learn programming is by starting with good code, and then having them modify it.

A surface code quantum computer in silicon

A surface code quantum computer in silicon

The best things and stuff of 2015

The best things and stuff of 2015 The annual post by Fogus. Great stuff.

How modern languages will save the text editor

How modern languages will save the text editor

Interesting post about programming language writing tools.

[…] the languages were developed in complete ignorance of these tools, which made them somewhat hostile to those goals (anybody who tried to implement a correct C++ parser knows what I mean, life before clang was just painful). As a result, very complex tools making heavy use of specialized partial parsers, static analysis, and crazy heuristics emerged. And they emerged as part of even more complex development suites to combine them all in a coherent form: the IDE was born.

[…]

But more recently, things took a different turn (for the best I think): a new language emerged that was promoting a different paradigm: Go. Instead of making the tooling an afterthought, it’s been pretty much there at some level since inception. It even shows in the language grammar itself, which is designed to enable fast compilation, partial parsing, and a whole bunch of analysis tools.

It resonates with an old paper I'm reading: Programming in an interactive environment the “LISP” experience by Eric Sandewall.

Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace

Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace

Nice post on Stephen Wolfram's blog ("In other words, she basically proposed to take on the role of CEO, with Babbage becoming CTO").

How to get good at chess, fast

How to get good at chess, fast

Programming Interactive Worlds with Linear Logic

Programming Interactive Worlds with Linear Logic

A Basis for Concurrency and Distribution

A Basis for Concurrency and Distribution

John Wiegley on git

From emacs-devel mailing list:

One thing to keep in mind is that Git has several distinct layers:

• The data model
• The plumbing
• The porcelain

The data model is incredibly simple. This, I think, is Git's main attraction. I've written about the data model in my article "Git from the Bottom Up", and also via a Haskell library for interacting with this model, called gitlib (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/gitlib).

The plumbing is… unintuitive to say the least. The porcelain is… fairly bad, but slowly getting better.

Collection of CSS styles for org

Collection of CSS styles for org A thread on Reddit with pointers to CSS styles for org-mode HTML export.

Clojure: If Lisp is so great, why do we keep needing new variants?

Clojure: If Lisp is so great, why do we keep needing new variants?

The one thing that Lisp programmers can agree on is how much better Lisp is than C and similar languages. I was talking last week to some programmers who use the Clojure version of Lisp and it made me wonder “If Lisp is so great, why did this guy have to build a slightly different version instead of building a popular application program in an existing version of Lisp, such as Common Lisp?”

Interesting discussion in the comments

Giraffe: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Chess

Giraffe: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Chess

Freer Monads, More Extensible Effects

Freer Monads, More Extensible Effects

Computer Science Courses that Don't Exist, But Should

Computer Science Courses that Don't Exist, But Should

The present in deep history

The present in deep history

Charlie Stross on his blog:

Assume you are a historian in the 30th century, compiling a pop history text about the period 1700-2300AD. What are the five most influential factors in that period of history?

The comments are interesting.

Monkey Island turns 25yo

Monkey Island turns 25yo

I can't even start telling how much is significant to me.

I have history back to ~2003.

I have history back to ~2003.

Width-adaptive XMonad layout

Width-adaptive XMonad layout

I thing this will be handy in the future

How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors

How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors

which-key

@manuel_uberti wrote about which-key, a package that displays available keybindings in popup. Manuel shows an example to activate it:

(which-key-mode)

(setq which-key-idle-delay 0.5
                which-key-key-replacement-alist
                '(("<\\([[:alnum:]-]+\\)>" . "\\1")
                  ("up"                  . "↑")
                  ("right"               . "→")
                  ("down"                . "↓")
                  ("left"                . "←")
                  ("DEL"                 . "⌫")
                  ("deletechar"          . "⌦")
                  ("RET"                 . "⏎")))

State of the Common Lisp Ecosystem, 2015

State of the Common Lisp Ecosystem, 2015

Ron Gilbert on Thimbleweed Park

Ron Gilbert on Thimbleweed Park

Saving games still scare me.This is something I should have figured out months ago. The issue isn't a matter of how to store the data, it's way more complex than that. There is a lot of data to iterate through and save off in a way that can be reconstructed. Doing save games is harder today than it was back in the SCUMM years. Back then we didn't have to worry about patching. These days, the save game has to survive the game being patched and that can mean resources being added or removed.

Ryan Carmack's game

Ryan Carmack's game

Ryan is John Carmack's son.

I’m still taking a little heat from my wife for using an obscure language instead of something mainstream that is broadly used in industry, but I have nothing but good things to say about using Racket and DrRacket for a beginning programmer, and highly recommend it.

How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions

How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions

They implemented different ethical settings in the software that controls automated vehicles and then tested the code in simulations and even in real vehicles. Such settings might, for example, tell a car to prioritize avoiding humans over avoiding parked vehicles, or not to swerve for squirrels.

As the technology advances, however, and cars become capable of interpreting more complex scenes, automated driving systems may need to make split-second decisions that raise real ethical questions.

At a recent industry event, Gerdes gave an example of one such scenario: a child suddenly dashing into the road, forcing the self-driving car to choose between hitting the child or swerving into an oncoming van.

“As we see this with human eyes, one of these obstacles has a lot more value than the other,” Gerdes said. “What is the car’s responsibility?”

The Turing Digital Archive

The Turing Digital Archive

The Internet with a human face

An interesting talk by Maciej Cegłowski.

Anyone who works with computers learns to fear their capacity to forget. Like so many things with computers, memory is strictly binary. There is either perfect recall or total oblivion, with nothing in between. It doesn't matter how important or trivial the information is. The computer can forget anything in an instant. If it remembers, it remembers for keeps.

[…]

Our lives have become split between two worlds with two very different norms around memory.

[…]

The online world is very different. Online, everything is recorded by default, and you may not know where or by whom. If you've ever wondered why Facebook is such a joyless place, even though we've theoretically surrounded ourselves with friends and loved ones, it's because of this need to constantly be wearing our public face. Facebook is about as much fun as a zoning board hearing.