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Designing and Implementing Glimmer Like a Programming Language

The first Ember view layer was designed kind of like you'd expect: it treated the "template language" as a very specialized external DSL with a decent amount of special syntax. In addition, the implementation was very ad-hoc, which led to a number of persistent, whack-a-mole bugs (including cases where "string

Safety is Rust's Fireflower

Steve is concerned [http://words.steveklabnik.com/rust-is-more-than-safety] that an overfocus on safety might sell Rust short. At its least compelling, safety turns into a PSA for you to "eat your vegetables." And he makes a good point that for people who have only worked with safe languages, it's a

TC39 Process Sketch, Stage 3

Following on from Stage 2 [https://thefeedbackloop.xyz/tc39-process-sketch-stage-2/], the next step of a JavaScript proposal is Stage 3. Stage 3 > Stage 3: Browser Early Adoption — Dave Herman (@littlecalculist) July 31, 2015 [https://twitter.com/littlecalculist/status/627187037804691457] Official Description [https://tc39.github.io/process-document/]: "Candidate" At this point, implementations

Reach Out

Something I've been working on lately is finding more little ways to connect with new people. Yehuda [https://twitter.com/wycats] and Brendan [https://twitter.com/BrendanEich] are really good at this. Their m.o. seems to be find any little excuse to reach out and start a conversation, about

Thoughts on "Dependency hell is NP-complete"

People have been talking about a post about package management dependency resolution by Russ Cox that opens "Dependency hell is NP-complete [https://research.swtch.com/version-sat]. But maybe we can climb out." It does a pretty good formal analysis of the problem of traditional dependency resolution (and its equivalence to

Stroustrup's Rule and Layering Over Time

Programming language experts like to claim that syntax doesn't matter, that semantics is all that counts. Don't believe them! They're overrotating on a common, pre-rigorous [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/] misunderstanding of language design as superficially aesthetic. The study of semantics does provide deep insights into

Revisit the Constraints

[VILLAGERS] Who needs a new song? This old one's all we need [CHIEF TUI] This tradition is our mission And Moana there's So much to do -- Moana, Where You Are [http://genius.com/Walt-disney-records-where-you-are-lyrics] I just got back from the Ember Face to Face this weekend and I was

Capture the Constraints

Between JavaScript standardization, building a research organization [https://mozilla.org/research] at Mozilla, and helping grow the Rust [https://www.rust-lang.org], Servo [https://servo.org], and WebAssembly [https://github.com/WebAssembly] projects, I get a lot of practice at consensus-building. Probably my favorite "one weird trick" is to capture

Political Detox Week on Hacker News

A few days ago, Hacker News started a self-imposed "political detox week." The idea was "no politics on Hacker News." I'll cite the argument in full: > Like everyone else, HN has been on a political binge lately. As an experiment, we're going to try something new and have a cleanse.

TC39 Process Sketch, Stage 2

Following on from Stages 0 and 1 [https://thefeedbackloop.xyz/tc39-a-process-sketch-stages-0-and-1/], the next step of a JavaScript proposal is Stage 2. Stage 2 > Stage 2: Userland Early Adoption — Dave Herman (@littlecalculist) July 31, 2015 [https://twitter.com/littlecalculist/status/627186964773535744] Official Description [https://tc39.github.io/process-document/]: "Draft" In my

Persuade, Don't Self-Gratify

The other day, there was a post floating around called Why Angular 2 is Terrible [https://meebleforp.com/blog/36/angular-2-is-terrible]. Actually, saying it was "floating around" is too weak: I saw it everywhere on Twitter, and searches for Angular on Twitter were dominated by this one post for a

TC39: A Process Sketch, Stages 0 and 1

This week, I asked on Twitter what TC39-related topics, people wanted me to talk about on this blog. Julia Evans (@b0rk [https://twitter.com/b0rk]) threw a bunch of questions at me, and I'll try to answer them one at a time. > @wycats [https://twitter.com/wycats] who is in

I Bet That Almost Works

Recently, I've noticed a pattern. When I present a problem that I'm having with a platform, I am often told "you can already do that with." An old example: Me: I really wish it was possible to get native-like acceleration when scrolling on mobile devices. Them: You can already do that with touch events! More and more, I find myself saying "I bet that almost works." What I mean is that while the API in question looks like it'll do what I need, it almo

The Mechanism is not the Mental Model

We had a discussion in TC39 this week about how to think about the JS module system [http://jsmodules.io]'s default export feature. It turns out one of the ways people explain this feature is as a shorthand for an export with the name default. For example: import LoadingSpinner

Questioning the Question

One of my favorite articles about working in a highly technical field is Paul Krugman's How I Work [http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html], which he wrote while working as a professor at MIT. A decent chunk of the article is technically connected to his economics work, but

TC39: Promises, Promises

This week's meeting has a few different Promise-related spec changes. Promise.try: async function as a Library One of the goals of Promise APIs is that exceptions that happen while processing the request become Promise rejections, rather than bubbling up to the top level (e.g. window.onerror). This is

TC39 Day 1: ES2017 Last Call

On the first day of TC39 (hosted by Facebook), we covered: the final features we hope make it into ES2017, improvements to regular expressions and promises, a grab-bag of tweaks to modules, and assorted other topics. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ES2017 Last Call We started the day by looking at features that hadn't

Hello

Hi! We're setting up this blog as a new experiment for ourselves. We wanted to have a space to comment on the tech news and events of the day, but at the same time try to step out of the HN/Twitter chatter. We especially want to try to connect