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“Put up in a place
where it's easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time.”
— Piet Hein
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Alexis King
7.2K posts
Alexis King
@lexi_lambda
computers can be understood • DMs open (but responsiveness varies) • she/her, ⚢
Chicago, IL Katılım Ekim 2012
22 Takip Edilen12.5K Takipçiler
racket-nonogram now supports automatically generating “mega nonogram” puzzles from standard puzzles
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@samth it’s just a very nice way of writing comments!! I don’t really understand why it isn’t more common tbh (well, okay, I do: it’s because most programmers seem to hate writing comments in general. but you know, skill issue)
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@lexi_lambda I appreciate your continued dedication to the GHC Notes concept.
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while working on this I have begun to understand why there are no mega picross implementations on the internet
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been working on a racket implementation of nonograms/picross that supports networked co-op github.com/lexi-lambda/ra…
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for the record, I do not consider this an improvement
Alexis King@lexi_lambda
Anyone else ever think about how fucked up it is that there’s no easy way to type em dashes on English keyboards outside of macOS? I feel like they are kind of an essential punctuation mark, comparable to if keyboards somehow didn’t have any way to type semicolons.
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I have published my first new blog post in four years lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2025/05/2…
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@tomjaguarpaw @tritlo @kerckhove_ts I’m not enormously fond of HasCallStack, but it’s undeniably useful. And if you think of it as a compiler directive in this way, then its behavior in this example doesn’t seem so scary. Of course two different identical TH splices can generate different code.
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@tomjaguarpaw @tritlo @kerckhove_ts Indeed, in a language with a sufficiently powerful macro system (Racket), it could really be implemented this way. But TH is not powerful enough to do this as it lacks a requisite piece of macro technology (syntax parameters), so a pseudo-constraint was a convenient alternative.
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Show me another language in which "x + x" can be an odd number.
cc @tomjaguarpaw
Tom Sydney Kerckhove@kerckhove_ts
Haskell has referential transparency, they said.
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>implying Hitler wasn't earnest and was only that way because he scrolled too much
GIF
Alexis King@lexi_lambda
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I would add something: we must believe in something good. We must allow ourselves to believe that there are things in the world that are good and beautiful and true, and that they are worth defending and fighting for.
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This is not posturing. There are other tenets held by my coalition I do not feel as strongly, and some I even disagree with. That does not change what I believe in my heart and my soul. It is easy to take a stand when doing so brings pride. Find a way to believe in something!
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I believe that the difference between truth and lies matters. I believe that scientific progress and an ever-more-nuanced view of our world is an incredible achievement of our civilization. I believe that welcoming those unlike ourselves is something to be proud of.
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I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I would add something: we must believe in something good. We must allow ourselves to believe that there are things in the world that are good and beautiful and true, and that they are worth defending and fighting for.
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update: someone has posted a remarkably extensive answer to this english.stackexchange.com/a/628758/17950
Alexis King@lexi_lambda
does anyone know the origin of the variant usage of “grovel” to mean “to rummage” or “to exhaustively search” commonly used in computing circles? if so, please answer my question on English Stack Exchange about this! english.stackexchange.com/q/628648/17950
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it would be really funny if they actually tried to do this, because it honestly seems pretty hard to write legislative language that defines “memory unsafe programming languages” in a way that doesn’t accidentally also ban Rust, Go, and any language with C FFI…
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Sorry, The C Programming Language Isn’t Available Right Now.
A law banning memory unsafe languages has been passed in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t access gcc right now.
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does anyone know the origin of the variant usage of “grovel” to mean “to rummage” or “to exhaustively search” commonly used in computing circles? if so, please answer my question on English Stack Exchange about this! english.stackexchange.com/q/628648/17950
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@samth @ianthehenry the term! it’s a very strange term to use for this concept and I think it is very confusing
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quote-unquote "macros"
ianthehenry.com/posts/quote-un…
one of these days i should probably learn basic lisp instead of rediscovering it piecemeal
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@samth @ianthehenry which is an absolutely horrible choice and should not be emulated!
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@ianthehenry This is usually called "3D syntax" in the Lisp (or at least Scheme) world.
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@samth I think this basically worked btw. it’s pretty low volume and not every question is a winner, but the site is mostly about interesting things instead of syntax! and it’s attracted people with PL expertise to write the answers. stack exchange model stays winning
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@samth fwiw, as of about a week and a half ago I am a moderator on this site, and we seem to be slowly making progress towards this goal
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I‘ve been participating on langdev.stackexchange.com for the past few days, and it’s been a lot of fun, but the community is badly in need of more people with real knowledge about PL/compilers. This is not a super high bar, and I suspect that many of my followers clear it.
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