Notices by Joe Groff (joe@f.duriansoftware.com), page 5

now that the "m4" imac is out, i can finally share some exciting news. we're migrating the Xcode build system to autoconf

Reading Cong Ma et al's "Lexical Effect Handlers, Directly" paper from OOPSLA, and it's interesting how often this dynamic scope -> lexical scope progression happens in programming language design https://2024.splashcon.org/details/splash-2024-oopsla/113/Lexical-Effect-Handlers-Directly

getting sorta mixed signals about how on fire my bebox is

@inthehands @quephird You definitely should check Decker out too! It's a pretty full-featured HyperCard successor that can deploy to the web and standalone native apps, and is designed to support reusable components and be approachable for non- or beginning programmers (much like HyperCard was)

@inthehands @quephird that's too bad because the APL family is pretty interesting IMO. it'd be cool to see a variant that used a more approachable character set. Lil (the language used by Decker) does take some ideas from array languages but is more traditional-ish

@quephird the kids have to learn about m4 sooner or later

@steve @fay59 society if CPUs and the C programming language defined signed division to round towards -∞

i think this one deserves a "finally". we're thinking about fixed-size arrays in swift https://forums.swift.org/t/vector-a-fixed-size-array/75264

@jrose @rjmccall @graydon seems like an open question how to have runtime reflection but also have proper localized modularity

glad to see people still like this dumb image I made. for the record, couldn’t have done it without the fine folks of cohost https://cohost.org/jckarter/post/4273322-empty

how to tell if your mouse is ripe

it started as an innocent dare—"if you love floating point so much, why don't you marry it?" hours later, they were NaN and wife

The 80s were a dark era of shoddy vendor compilers and shifting standards for pre-ANSI C, but some implementers did interesting things with their compilers to set them apart from the crowd. MetaWare's High C Compiler, in addition to a bunch of nice quality-of-life extensions, had closures and generators with non-local returns, 30-odd years ago!

https://duriansoftware.com/joe/the-lost-language-extensions-of-metaware's-high-c-compiler

the Riemann sphere is a nice idea and all, but it doesn't take the realities of floating-point computation into account. that's why i'm introducing the Kahan Torus

Our stopped clock technology is still in its infancy, but it's already reached an accuracy rate of two or more times per day, and there's no reason for us to believe that won't improve dramatically in the future

@NeoNacho @krzyzanowskim we should go back to fully user-configurable color schemes imo

@bigzaphod yeah the Commodore 64's BASIC kinda lets you down in providing any easy access to the C64 hardware. There are some third-party BASICs that provide easier-to-use sprite and sound primitives

@bigzaphod my understanding is that it was a pretty rushed port of the BASIC they already had licensed and ported from the PET and VIC-20 before it. Microsoft BASIC as you'd get it from Microsoft didn't really put an emphasis on graphics and sound support until the Apple II's Integer BASIC shipped with easy access to the graphics and sound hardware

@inthehands @gregtitus it's also not always obvious when there's load-bearing "structure" hidden in the "mess"

@inthehands this seems to be a general pattern with how human systems evolve, whether they be hardware, software, bureaucracy, spoken language, etc. once you have experts in the system, it becomes costly to change their learned workflows even if it would lead to an overall simpler, easier-to-use, or more efficient design, so new capabilities get pushed into weirder and weirder niches