by porting ffmpeg to the zig build system, it becomes possible to compile ffmpeg on any supported system for any supported system using only a 50 MiB download of zig. For open source projects, this streamlined ability to build from source - and even cross-compile - can be the difference between gaining or losing valuable contributors.

Wirth himself realized the problems of Pascal and his later languages are basically improved versions of Pascal -- Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon. But these languages didn't even really displace Pascal itself let alone C -- but maybe if he had named them in a way that made it clear to outsiders that these were Pascal improvements they would have had more uptake.

Messages are delineated by newlines. This means, in particular, that the JSON encoding process must not introduce newlines within a message. Note however that newlines are used in this document for readability.

Another way I get inspiration for research ideas is learning about people's pain points during software development Whenever I hear or read about difficulties and pitfalls people encounter while I programming, I ask myself "What can I do as a programming language researcher to address this?" In my experience, this has also been a good way to find new research problems to work on.

Also, for those who for some reason prefer curly brackets over Python-style indenting, it is also possible to write:

almost all beginners to RDF go through a sort of "identity crisis" phase, where they confuse people with their names, and documents with their titles. For example, it is common to see statements such as:- <http://example.org/> dc:creator "Bob" . However, Bob is just a literal string, so how can a literal string write a document?

Patch based systems are idiotic, that's RCS, that is decades old technology that we know sucks (I've had a cocktail, it's 5pm, so salt away).Do you understand the difference between pass by reference and pass by value?

how important is the concrete syntax of their language in contrast to

The creators of Scrivener have taken a process that formerly had to be done manually by writers, and built a system of cues that make it easy and natural.

@stephen@social.stephenfry.com

The LISP part, though, is not going well. Porting clever 1970s Stanford AI Lab macros written on the original SAIL machine to modern Common LISP is hard. Anybody with a knowledge of MACLISP want to help?

Want to animate navigations between pages? You can’t (yet). Want to avoid the flash of white? You can’t, until Chrome fixes it (and it’s not perfect yet). Want to avoid re-rendering the whole page, when there’s only a small subset that actually needs to change? You can’t; it’s a “full page refresh.”

Because we didn’t have real marketing people, we updated the product to became more and more interesting to us, the developers, and less interesting to potential buyers.

an acknowledgement of network effects: LP is unlikely to ever catch on enough to be the majority, so there needs to be a way for a random programmer using their preferred IDE/editor to edit a "literate" program

"Whether those slashes were forward slashes or back slashes didn't affect how the Web worked," he says, "but it does affect how other developers react to it