Programming Leftovers
-
Alexandre Poirot: Knowledge versus market -- Sharing versus Ease of use.
This blog post is a continuation of the previous one about the history of editing and publishing in web browsers.
I'm now going to focus on the significant shift of vision about the Web between the two first browsers: WorldWideWeb versus Mosaic.
While the very first, WorldWideWeb, defined the web as being editable by default, Mosaic restricted the browser to become read-only. All features related to web page editing disappeared in Mosaic.
Later down the road, Netscape 4 re-introduced a web page editor. But as Netscape copied the interpretation of the Web from Mosaic, the web pages were no longer editable by default. This somewhat divided users in two distinct groups: readers versus authors. The editor in Netscape 4 was an external feature of the browser, opening a distinct window.
-
Noel Rappin ☛ Better Know A Ruby Thing #2: Constants
A fun thing about learning Ruby is that sometimes concepts that have the same name as in other languages have different behavior and purpose in Ruby.
Today: constants
They aren’t actually constant.
They aren’t only used for small strings or magic literals. They aren’t even mostly used for that in most Ruby programs.
Constants are one of the core pieces of Ruby and they aren’t super-well documented in the official site, so here we go…
Hi – we’ve gotten some comments that the code snippets don’t look good on Apple Mail in dark mode. Buttondown is working on this, but if you need to, you can also find this newsletter on the web at https://noelrappin.com/blog/2023/10/better-know-a-ruby-thing-22-constants
-
Michael Sheldon: How to make Flutter’s AlertDialog screen reader friendly
While developing Pied, I discovered that Flutter’s AlertDialog widget isn’t accessible to screen reader users (there’s been a bug report filed against this for over a year). Text within the AlertDialog doesn’t get sent to the screen reader when the dialog is focused. The user has no indication that the dialog is present, let alone what its contents are.
-
Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2023.43 Releastober
Justin DeVuyst has released the 2023.10 release of the Rakudo Compiler implementing the Raku Programming Language. Followed up by the usual binary releases, and a new Rakudo Star release! Only a few visible changes this month, most of the work was done on RakuAST.
-
Free software pioneer Richard Stallman is battling cancer
A nearly hairless Stallman pulls down his mask briefly to reveal that his beard has gone, too In appropriate GNU style, the video is a WebP file on the GNU.org site, rather than being hosted on a commercial streaming service, and at any rate, the sound quality makes it difficult to follow. We suggest downloading the file and playing it locally – VLC supports the format well – but we struggled to discern his words even so. Stallman appeared seated, and was wearing an antiviral face mask, which he urged the audience to do as well. The result is that his voice was muffled, causing members of the audience to call out that they could not hear him.
He said that he is suffering from follicular lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. This a blood cancer, which causes B lymphocytes to form clumps in the lymphatic system.