The next C

So people are actually to the point now where the replacement of C as the ubiquitous system programming language is at least within the limits of plausibility. Here's a Quora post from one of the originators of D identifying three candidates: D, Rust, and Go. Each has strengths, each has weaknesses. I suspect we'll see some convergent evolution.

I like this proliferation of languages of late. Shows the diversity of thought.

Joke generation with Wolfram

Interesting. Not all that fascinating, but any kind of computational handling of language is pretty cool.

Parinfer and typing/understanding Lisp

Now this is the kind of thing I love to see: Parinfer [hnn]. It uses indentation to show structure while inferring paren closure to preserve syntactic validity. You can switch back and forth between inferring parens or inferring indentation. It makes sense. This kind of thing is really exciting to see.

ChucK

ChucK is a ... well, it's a language just for building music machines, apparently. Also, HNN link for lots of related things, like SuperCollider. I really want to take some time to do this stuff. Someday.

Git book

This might be a good thing to study.

OOSMOS

OOSMOS is an object-oriented threadless concurrency ... thing for C/C++ that can also run in firmware on the Arduino, which is pretty fascinating.

Geometrical figures

Just a little note for myself here, but Geogebra is probably one of the best ways to manipulate geometrical things right now. We did some diagrams in InkScape for a LaTeX paper, but it really wasn't ideal.

That said, though, PGF and TikZ seem to be the best-practice approach in the LaTeX field (not a graphics editor, but a description language).

Deep linguistic learning for email responses

This has been showing up in the usual places (even on my Facebook feed, today) and is good for some toothgrinding as I fervently wish I had more time to work like this.

Parsing a command line

You would think this would be easy to find. I've got a string - perhaps taken from a file - that represents a command. I want to parse it into an ARGV-like structure, with proper string quoting and that kind of thing.

• Here's a way to do it in C#: CommandLineParser.
• Or you can get Windows to do it for you, from Perl.
• Oh, right. Text::ParseWords. I knew I already knew the answer to this.

That said, I should probably roll my own based on the same parsing tools in Decl::Syntax.