Notices by Peter Brett (krans@mastodon.me.uk)

@neil I loved my Zaurus C-3000. Even as a Sharp employee in 2005 it was hard to get one in the UK. Mine is languishing in a box somewhere, untouched since the day I acquired the even-better Nokia N900.

@dalias That seems lukewarm at best. I think you could replace “C“ and “Rust” with any programming language and it would still be true.

“‘vibe coded’ Lua is a far greater risk that well engineered Brainfuck.

I wish Mastodon had a way to add a note for me to remind myself why someone is blocked, e.g. “Sealioning,” “Xenophobia,” or “Can't deal with right now”

@dalias “a small cleft, slit, or fissure” is also a very respectable word, isn't it?

@mikebabcock Human language is complex. As far as I can, most of the complexity in Unicode arises from scripts being inherently complex; the remainder is due to providing a migration path from older encoding forms.

I haven't found any complexity in Unicode that I didn't (grudgingly) agree was necessary, apart from emoji…

@dalias

@dalias I thought surrogates were USVs but not codepoints? @mikebabcock

@dalias Yes, it's not mapped to a character it's not a codepoint. Sorry, my wording was ambiguous.

@mikebabcock

@mikebabcock Those are code units

@mikebabcock Quick guide to Unicode terminology:

- code units: the in-memory elements of the text encoding, i.e. bytes for UTF-8, 32-bit integers for UTF-32, etc
- codepoints: the numbers in the range 0–0x10FFFF that are mapped to abstract characters
- graphemes: the smallest functional units of a script, formed from one or more codepoints
- grapheme clusters: the things people usually would describe as ”a character” for the purpose of cursor motion, “the number of characters,” etc.

@glynmoody WTAF

@mjr OFCOM have been, and continue to be, completely useless and ineffectual at holding anyone with actual power to account. They only ever punch down.

@glynmoody

@glynmoody Meanwhile many small discussion forums have announced geoblocking the UK because of the completely unmanageable liabilities created by the Online Safety Act. One law for the rich, another for the poor…

@dpk This is very thought-provoking — thank you! Is it even _possible_ to have a single basic record abstraction that fits all use cases (or can be used to build all use cases), as you suggest? Some of the most basic criteria seem mutually exclusive, but maybe I just haven't thought about it for long enough…

@glynmoody From the story, it sounds like he's going to get no punishment whatsoever.

Our in-house #Scheme dialect (SKILL++) makes heavy use of Disembodied Property Lists, an archaic feature of ancient Lisps like MacLisp and Franz Lisp.

They're an interesting data structure: a list-based associative data structure with unique identity and intended for destructive mutation.

I started drafting an SRFI. But I'm probably going to give up. I can't envision getting corporate VP-level approval for publication, and even if I do, I expect the SRFI commentariat to die laughing.

@mcc Yes, this is very good advice! Also, reading Unicode Technical Reports is a great way to get detailed information about the relevant algorithms and technical best practice needed to put that domain expertise to use. @david_chisnall

@mcc Hah! #Unicode deals with human language and scripts, which are much more complicated, inconsistent and illogical than reasonably expected; and text handling is not something that seems to be taught anywhere by anyone.

I guess the conclusion is that software engineers are just expected to learn how to Unicode correctly by collective telepathy? @david_chisnall

@cstross How about “Cosy sci-fi”, a la ‘A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet’

Hello, fellow #Scheme programmers.

In which #IRC channels do the RnRS aficionados hang out nowadays?

@cwebber @flatwhatson @dthompson

@glynmoody It is unclear to me how this is better than a train.