Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 27, 2022

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• Lagrange v1.14: Pinned Identities, CLI Options

  Looks like the becoming-father-for-the-2nd-time hiatus is ending since I've been able to make some progress with Lagrange. This release has nothing radically new, but there are a few useful improvements and a handful of bug fixes.

• Language levels problems with Rust while learning day 1

  I started learning Rust recently as on of the other maintainers of Drogon tries and likes it. And C++ have it's own pile of problems. Not saying I don't like C++ anymore just that I'm trying to learn something new. In the process I found a few places I dislike about Rust. Especially from the point of view of a HPC programmer.

• Late-November Capsule Status

  I've posted almost no logs in the second half of November, but Rob's Capsule is certainly not dormant. Most of my capsule updates have come in the form of posting daily results from "Where in the World?" by acidus^, which I've greatly enjoyed playing. The rest of my capsule activity has mostly been edits and corrections to existing documents.

  I haven't had a lot of time or motivation to write recently, largely because of other events happening in my life. There have been a few discussion topics floating around in my head, but if I don't feel sufficiently moved to write about them, I worry that my logs will sound forced or low-effort.

  That doesn't mean I haven't been working on new things for the capsule either. I've been working on some CGI content behind the scenes, at least one of which I hope to have live by the end of this weekend.

• vi Exit Strategies

  This is for ex-vi as seen in OpenBSD. Other flavors of vi may have fewer, more, or different options available. Some of these will fail if the buffer has been modified, e.g. :q would need to become :q! or :wq and ZZ might need to be ZZZZ if the vi has the "more files to edit" bug.

• Re: I Don’t Run Session Zero

  Malin doesn’t run a session zero and I couldn’t disagree more.

  Now, I do a session zero maybe… a third of the time? Two-fifths? It’s hard to say because it’s increasingly often. It’s not a hard and fast rule but it’s just often been more helpful than not.

• bookmarklet collection!

  I'm collecting bookmarklets because it seems a lot of people forget they exist, or what they're capable of, then end up making add-ons when they don't need to.

• You can program functionally in any computer language

  A few days ago I wrote a comment on The Orange Site [1] that seemed to strike a chord there. The comment was about applying a few principles of functional programming [2] in any language (well, maybe not BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) from the 70s or 80s, but these versions of BASIC aren't used much these days). There's no need for functional application, functional composition, first class functions, monads, (“Monads! How do they work? [3]”) or even currying. No, I feel like you can get about 85% of the way to functional programming by following three simple principles.

^* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.