Links

What's that touchscreen in my room?

laplab.me

Roughly a year ago I moved into my new apartment. One of the reasons I picked this apartment was age of the building. The construction was finished in 2015, which ensured pretty good thermal isolation for winters as well as small nice things like Ethernet ports in each room. However, there was one part of my apartment that was too new and too smart for me.

John Earnest and Multimedia

arraycast.com

John Earnest returns to talk about his work extending the array languages into other domains and his new project, Decker.

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“Languages are user interfaces, and these concise, expressive languages that you can use at a REPL are a significant user interface.”

Fake Trees: Using Indents For Simpler UIs

ratfactor.com

I find that these lists are often just formatted this way for human organization. There’s no actual need for a formal relationship between them.

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Why is this simpler? Because it literally describes what you see on the screen. Which means it’s easy as pie to render. Note how the sort order is now absolute for the entire list, not for sub-item order. The indent is quite literally how much space to put before the item.

As programmers, this shows that it’s often good to step back for a minute and say “am I doing it this way because my computer training makes me think it is necessary, or because it is simple and gets the actual job done?”