Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

Programming language development, human factors, and a healthy dose of Emacs. Also https://t.co/faGheKDz69 and https://t.co/sqqeQ20uHV wilfred.me.uk London, UK Joined June 2009

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Laurence Tratt @laurencetratt

20 hours ago

I like articles which challenge our assumptions, even when I only partly agree with them. The article below posits that type systems in programming languages are a poor substitute for different architectures of software systems.

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 days ago

I've been playing with labels on my code blocks. Sometimes I have useful labels, other times it's just "Example 2". It's also unclear exactly where I put the label: Inside the box? Outside? Are there any docs sites that do this really well?

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

6 days ago

Do users of immutable systems (i.e Nix or Guix) upgrade more or less often than other platforms? There's less pressure to upgrade (unlike a rolling release distro) but in principle upgrading is easier.

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

a week ago

Is there a programming equivalent of the strawberry problem, i.e. a specific coding task that LLMs are consistently bad at?

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

a week ago

Trying to let my 3yo try as many different technology interfaces as possible. Mouse: not too bad, especially after reducing sensitivity. Keyboard: WASD is easy to lose track of in a sea of buttons. Controller: requires both hands together, especially the left, which is tricky.

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

2 weeks ago

Blogging about my programming language project: choosing the basic syntax! garden-lang.org/blog/syntax.ht…

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

2 weeks ago

GNU Make defaults to a single worker, and newer build tools (e.g. ninja) default to the number of physical CPUs.I wish there was an option for 'leave me a little bit of my machine to do stuff'.

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 weeks ago

Today I learnt that Racket intentionally doesn't have a traditional REPL workflow. The authors were concerned about students not understanding the state between the current session and the code on disk. (Arguably Jupyter has some of these features now.) blog.racket-lang.org/2009/03/the-dr…

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 weeks ago

The Matter protocol is excellent for puns. "Does it Matter? It doesn't Matter."

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 weeks ago

I'm experimenting with syntax in examples. I don't really like Rust's `assert(inc(1) == 2)` syntax, I find it a little distracting. I'm trying `inc(1) //-> 2`. The comment is rendered differently, and there's nothing before the sample code. What do you think?

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 weeks ago

I've started keeping a list of particularly interesting bugs and patches that I've worked on: github.com/Wilfred/intere… The time that I once removed *a single closing paren* in Emacs is still my favourite.

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

4 weeks ago

Playing with Claude and my new programming language has made me add features that it wants. I think they're reasonable. `for method in methods` -- custom syntax error explaining that `method` is a reserved word `echo 'println("hello world") | garden` -- eval snippets from stdin

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

a month ago

Playing with optional type signatures in Python, I realise that the return type is the most important to me. I'd much rather have a function with only a return type instead of a function with only parameter types. It's often quick to add too.

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

2 months ago

One nice feature of cargo that I wasn't previously aware of: you don't need to do anything after updating your Cargo.toml. In npm, you need to remember to `npm i` after changing package.json. It's not declarative and the state can get out of sync.

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

2 months ago

I'm changing method definition syntax in my language: // old fun (this: Int) inc(): Int { this + 1 } // new method inc(this: Int): Int { this + 1 } The original syntax was inspired by Go, but the new syntax is more grep-friendly and perhaps more readable. Thoughts?

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 months ago

I'm still experimenting with UIs for live (sandboxed) evaluation of tests. I've realised that you really want to highlight the failing assertion, not just the failing test. Feedback welcome :)

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 months ago

Just released a new version of difftastic! * Verilog support * Improved Erlang, F#, Gleam, Pascal and Swift * Better detection of binary files github.com/Wilfred/diffta…

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 months ago

I find it fascinating how some businesses have scheduled downtime for their websites (e.g. my electricity provider last weekend), but others don't. I suspect it's primarily culture. You generally need to turn off electricity to do work, so your other tooling may reflect that.

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 months ago

Zig shipped a RISC-V backend before AArch64! I think RISC-V is doing really well in the technology enthusiast community. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442222…

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 months ago

One cute feature of markdown I'd not noticed before: there's no syntax for images *without* a description (i.e. alt text). ![a person](/wilfred.jpg) spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#images