The Belkadan Software Blog
As of this year I’ve had my first experience serving on a jury, in a criminal case in a California court. Years of TV and a few school electives told me what to expect, while still knowing an actual trial probably wouldn’t be like that at all. And…it was and it wasn’t! Hence this post.
Sometimes you have configuration files or simple data files that you want to maintain by hand, in a text editor. There are dozen of reusable formats for this, but only a few of them really support hierarchical entries. You can argue that configuration files should stay relatively flat, but if you eventually run into a situation where you need hierarchy, you’ll be unhappy not to have it.
A while back I posted this spicily-phrased take: I appreciate that someone else understands that being a GUI has some basic requirements and “draws to the screen” is not the interesting one. The bar is about 20cm off the floor but everyone forgets to jump. Despite mostly not working on GUIs in my career, I have strong opinions about consistency and about affordances for beginners and power users…
SICPelago is a randomized Scheme environment where you unlock core capabilities by solving carefully selected exercises adapted from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs . Starting only with your trusty lambda and the supporting quote , climb your way to the top of the textbook, exploring math puzzles, composite data structures, and infinite sequences. Happy April Prototypes Day !
Last week a friend shared the existence of hlorenzi’s customasm , a tool that can serve as the assembler for arbitrary CPU architectures just by defining a mapping of instructions to encodings. Hey, I made a CPU once! How hard would it be to make a customasm definition for ROSE-8? Turns out…not very! I played around with it for about two hours, and by the end of it I’d translated an entire ROSE-8…