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Programming Leftovers
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[Old] Words and Buttons Online ☛ Lexical differential highlighting instead of syntax highlighting
Reading assembly is not as hard as it might occur to an untrained person. In fact, everyone can read a bit of assembly. But in large quantities, it's not too easy either. The mnemonics like RCR, SHRD, WBINVD, and CMPXCHG8B are fun to write, but hell to read.
What's worse, the standard approach to syntax highlighting doesn't help at all. It's fine that mov doesn't look like eax, but I'd rather prefer pmulhw and pmulhuw to be shown as differently as possible.
So I employed another kind of highlighting. It's not sytnax but lexical differential highlighting. “Lexical” since it doesn't need true syntax analysis, primitive tokenization and filtering are enough. And it's “differential” because it aims to highlight the difference between lexemes. Ideally, the smaller the lexical difference, the greater the color difference should be.
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Marijke Luttekes ☛ Quick tip: Personal Django management command with git exclude / Marijke Luttekes
In Django, I sometimes want to run queries or perform specific actions quickly without going through a UI or a process.
In these situations, I will opt for a Django management command: I can program it however I want, then call it from the command-line interface as often as I want.
However, I do not want my experimental code to end up in a repository. So this is where git exclude comes into play.
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Nikita Prokopov ☛ I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong
Syntax highlighting is a tool. It can help you read code faster. Find things quicker. Orient yourself in a large file.
Like any tool, it can be used correctly or incorrectly. Let’s see how to use syntax highlighting to help you work.
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[Old] Buttondown LLC ☛ Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel
Nothing wrong with distinguishing syntax. It's the "just" that bothers me. Highlighting syntax is not always the most important thing to us. The information we want from code depends on what we're trying to do. I'm interesting in different things if I'm writing greenfield code vs optimizing code vs debugging code vs doing a code review. I should be able to swap different highlighting rules in and out depending on what I need. I should be able to combine different rules into task-level overlays that I can toggle on and off.
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LWN ☛ Transition of RubyGems Repository Ownership
The Ruby community has experienced some turbulence of late after Ruby Central took control of the Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub repositories for a number of projects including RubyGems and Bundler. Those projects have historically been developed separately from Ruby itself. They are now being put under the control of Ruby's core team, according to Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. "Matz"): [...]
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Python
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Rlang ☛ What’s new for Python in 2025?
Python 3.14 was released on 7th October 2025. Here we summarise some
of the more interesting changes and some trends in Python development and data-science
over the past year. We will highlight the following:the colourful Python command-line interface;
project-management tool uv;
free-threading;
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Standards/Consortia
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The New Stack ☛ CSS Finally Gets Inline Conditional Logic With New if() Function
The new function, arriving in the 2025 snapshot, is unprecedented for CSS.
“This one really caught me off guard,” admitted Adkins to the audience.
While most of CSS is about the shading and coloring and various other details of presentation, the spec has not offered much in the way of logic processing.
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