DSL

Testing interacts with your dopamine system, so you will a small yay! every time all tests passed. This is crucial, because motivation tend to decays exponentially and to experience inevitable “crashes” after spikes. TTD is sort of a direct consequence of type-driven (or “types first”) approach to prototyping. Ideally, each type is associated (in an one-to-one correspondence) with each distinct concept in the problem domain, at an appropriate level of abstraction. ...

Maybe it is time to settle this discurse once and for all, and move on. Recently I asked Deepseek (otherwise amazing), Grok (a meme) and Gemini about idiomatic way of enabling syntax highlighting in blocks of code, which may appear in an eww or nov modes. What they all give me is some stylized pasta from StackOverflow and Github about polymode and mmm-mode and how to use regexps to find particular blocks and to apply some low-level function on a range. ...

There are lots of literal degens (undeveloped, unrefined, lacking any sense of beauty and elegance) who keep parroting the stupid mantra “syntax does not matter” or “syntax is not important”, or “it is a mater of individual prurience”. Idiots. There is a universal human notion which we call [careful and even obsessive] “attention to details”. In certain cultures this part is very prominent, and one can tell. Every neurologically normal person could name that particular country. Other countries had either brief periods of such “enlightenment” in their past, that can still be observed in traditional architectural and art forms, or have some occupations in which attention to details is the paramount, like that long lost German automobile engineering in the 70s and 80s. ...

DATE: <2025-04-22 Tue> A lot in common with cooking, which is (arguably) the simplest and the most ancient form of engineering. (TODO: explain with examples). No one can learn to cook by watching a “food porn” on social networks. It is a “learn-by-doing (and making mistakes)” process. Small, complete (Always Be Compiled) iterations, which conceptually corresponds to “recursive calls” of a spiral-shaped recursive process, which ends up at (converges to) a local optimum. ...

There is a small but turbulent shitstorm on Lobste.rs about Go: https://lobste.rs/s/cclrkn/were_multiple_return_values_go_s_biggest and the key quote, perhaps, is this: I’m always amazed how Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer, with a combined 100+ years experience with PLT and about a dozen languages, are treated as total idiots by people whose greatest hits are building a web app once. There is how I think about it. Back at the late 90s, when suddenly, out of fucking nowhere we have got Internet, FreeBSD and Linux and that Apache httpd, everything seemed to be just as an endless WOW!!! Something new and amazing almost every day. ...

It is that simple. The momentum, which is partially due to the unprecedented AI bubble, is such that it actually became “too big to fail” and too important (for more than one industries) to not be “done right”. 3.14 is getting a proper tail-calls in the interpreter, 3.13 got an initial support for native compilation. It will only continue to get polished by literally millions. The last fundamentally right addition was the support for the proper sum-types (a tagged union) as dataclasses and the the related pattern-matching syntax. ...

Here is the Dan Grossman’s Caml tutorial (refresher) for Ocaml. The cool thing about it is that it shows how little we all need. https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~djg/teachingMaterials/gpl/lectures/camlTutorial.pdf He is actually a very cool guy, who teaches the principles (and precise semantics) of programming using the classic languages – SML and Ocaml, which were carefully designed by talented math majors to build theorem provers and proof assistants. These languages (and Erlang) ought to be “all you need”, but the world is what it is (Pootin, Trump and what not) so we have Java or C++ or, if unlucky – PHP or Javascript. ...

What is a pattern? A properly captured by the Mind (of an external observer) into a named abstraction “frequently emerging arrangement”. There are obvious weather patterns, seasonal patterns, social patterns, and so on. The most “concrete” emergent patterns are the “structural patterns” – rivers, trees, proteins, biological species. The most fundamental structural patterns has been captured as abstractions: linear sequences trees (acyclic directed graphs) tables (lookup tables) More abstractions has been derived ...

Python is eating the word. When I type “Python” on the Library Genesis search prompt I’m getting some 300 pages (7628 files found | showing results from 1 to 25). This has to be bullshit. Arguably, the mass hysteria has started when MIT switched from the classic MIT Scheme to Python as its main teaching language. The AIMA code at Berkeley has been ported from Common Lisp to Python at about the same time. ...

I created for myself the meme Going Full Gogans (you know) which is, literally, what one should do in order to achieve anything slightly above mediocrity. To go “higher” one has to Go Full Steppenwolf. which means to fully embrace and stick to the classics, ignoring everything “modern” as one ignores “user-defined genders and pronouns”. By “classics” I mean just a few distinct well-established traditions and related cultures. The LISP tradition, with distinct MIT Scheme, Norvig and Graham books, and later Clojure cultures. The CLU and of Barbara Liskov tradition and a related subculture based on the books. The ML tradition, with SML, Ocaml, F#, Scala (reaction to Java – the monument to human stupidity) cultures. The Miranda and Haskell, tradition and all the one-man’s pure language subcultures and books. The Erlang tradition (principle-guided, well-researched commercial successin telecoms). The GNU Emacs tradition, can be traced back to the sanity of the MIT CSAIL. The Python tradition of attention to details and of striving to do things just right (for an interpreter). The Go tradition (Bell labs, Plan9, UTF-8, Inferno, the Go standard library, C.A.R Hoare concurrency primitives). The Ada tradition, as of an academic imperative language – sane and “safe”. The Rust tradition, as the reaction to the C++ – humiliation to the human intelligence. Except for Rust, which is too new, the above mentioned constitute the Golden Age of Programming (forever lost). ...