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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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

3 days ago

For hobby projects, I really like software where I can do small features or tweaks. Sometimes I don't have time for anything more substantial. Website projects are great for this. Are there other areas?

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

4 days ago

I've been writing docs for different programming language operators (+, *, == and so on). Each one gets a separate web page. I've suddenly realised that / is much harder! docs/+ and docs/== is fine, but docs// just doesn't work as a URL in a static site. Any ideas?

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

5 days ago

I've released difftastic 0.65! Highlights of this release: * Better parsing of Clojure, Common Lisp, Kotlin, Rust and Zig. * Quality of life improvements for binary files. github.com/Wilfred/diffta…

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

2 weeks ago

Text to speech systems seem to have largely avoided the uncanny valley effect. I've encountered robotic sounding voices but it's way less unsettling than bad CGI. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe looking at faces is just way higher bandwidth so more things can go wrong?

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

2 weeks ago

I'm surprised by how many different weather forecasts I can get out different apps. Surely there aren't many API providers for weather predictions? Alternative conspiracy theory: do weather apps that predict nicer weather get more downloads?

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Laurence Tratt @laurencetratt

3 weeks 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

4 weeks 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

4 weeks 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 month 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 month 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

a month ago

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

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

a month 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

a month 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

a month ago

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

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Wilfred Hughes @_wilfredh

a month 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

3 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

3 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?