Disable towardsdatascience and hbr paywall

...By autopopping an incognito window ...

org, roam, zettelkasten links.

Here we have a couple of links talking about the new wave on PIM, bookmarking, concept-linking.

It used to be the case that each one of us had a smilar but not quite the same system. But it seems that zettelkasten, and roam are getting some gravitational pull so people are joining them.

Usual links are org-roam, zettelkasten, and another link to zettelkasten-in-plain-org

N Good Javascript Tutorials

There's so much about javascript on the web that it's always been hard (for me) to find good resources.  But I think I found these N tutorials that are pretty good.

• https://javascript.info/
• https://exploringjs.com/deep-js/
• https://stjs.tech/
  
• https://js4ds.org/
  

Good tutorials are hard to find and keeping the good links is important. I'm keeping also this docker tutorial. I just wish I've had it 3 years ago.

A pipe inspector with tee

I've kept writing my scripting-field-guide, adding some more common pitfalls and cool tricks I've used in the last years. 

Something I started using not long time ago is the "tee >()" incantation. It's super cool to be able to branch off the output of a command to another command, and make some sort of tree. 

For now, there's this snippet I created to be able to inspect the contents of a pipe:

The default to the current timestamp isn't going to really work, as the string is evaluated only once, but I hope I'll get something more decent soon.

Another cool usage is when selecting something from a grep/fzf/dmenu and you want to do something with it like open that file, but also copy it to your clipboard.

The clearest example is my daily-zoom-selector, where I'm not just opening the room, but also copying it.

Programming with Constraints

I've been following https://www.hillelwayne.com/ for some time and there's always something valuable to take to your daily life from each one of his posts.

Highest level is queuing theory and TLA+ stuff. But the couple of articles that touched home the most are his J lang article and the decision table patterns (and its intro from long time ago). 

He uses productivity tools that reasonate a lot with my way of tooling. AutoHotKey, editors, minilanguages and, Constraint Propagation Systems.

On CPS, he talks about MiniZinc and OR-Tools. For me, Oz/Mozart rang a bell (from CPM book), and cl:screamer. I don't know if Z3 overlaps with it, but worth mentioning too.

Now onto my usage/takeaway of this: I used screamer to create a magic-square some time ago, and last week I was thinking if I could use screamer, Prolog, or PiLog to solve the coin change problem.

Well, as just today, I read about this MiniZinc tool and when this watching the MiniZinc videos, it was clear that yes, it should be possible, and it might be worth to try the coin change there. Here's what I came with (using screamer):

I haven't figured out how to do the performance analysis of this, but I suspect it will be less efficient than the usual manual way, because the only 'fitness' function is v=, but it's a complete hit-or-miss. once the current factors add up to an already bigger num than out target, this algorithm will keep trying "what if I add one coin of 1cent?", "and what about 2?".  

IIRC, in CPM, there are some explanations of smarter CPS, but I'm not sure if they apply here, as there is only a single 'cut', which is the final objective function.

Flow State

I've been subscribing more and more to newsletters lately. It's kinda RSS on your mail.

I discovered (in https://subreply.com, which is an "interesting" social network I tried once) this Music Newsletter called FlowState. And boy, it's SO GOOD. Relaxing non-vocal flowy music every day.  There's jazz, there's (psy-)?ambient, new-age, tribal, house,... I'm surprised every day by a couple of playlists I can snap into spotify and start working.

Of course, reading mail in emacs makes that you can just automate the shit out of it. It placed my radios repo in a clear 2nd place on my daily music listening.

Here's an example of a great thing that appeared yesterday in Flow State. Anthony Braxton: Six Monk's Compositions (1987)

Enjoy.

On Writing

I've lately been a bit interested in writing style. The triggers were a couple of things:

1) People in my $ENV abusing extremely indirect-passive I-am-not-that-involved I-dont-give-many-fucks-but-I-talk-academically-to-seem-that-at-least-I-am-thoghtful.  Yes, the problem probably lies in me, but I digress.

2) I discovered this writing plain English. This page is short, to the point, and I found it amazing that you can apply 99% of it to programming, and behaving, and many planes of your daily life. It caused a big impact. It's like a Fowler's article masked as an English writing guide.

3) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41298774

Then "The Internet" started throwing links and videos at me about writing effectively, like this Steven Pinker one, or this other one aimed at academics writing articles, but with interesting insights from the University of Chicago. Also, did you know that George Orwell has a very cited text on English style? I didn't. But it's cool.

So, I haven't read 'The Elements of Style' or plan to (for now), but I can recommend all 4 links here. You can ingest them in a single day, with your non-tech-geek SO, and have thoughtful discussions. Long term, if something sticks, great.  Else, you write a blogpost about those links so you can reference and reread them later on. :)

Addendum: https://www.julian.com/guide/write/intro looks like good advice also

The Web 2.1

I've never done any kind of smart frontend. My Rails experience was more inside lib/ and app/{models,controllers} than in app/views or assets/ . 

Over the years I tried a few frameworks to see if any of those 'clicked', but I didn't give time to any of them to sink in.

I the re-frame tutorials, but I didn't have any project of any size to try it.

I tried mithrill.js when I wrote my ultimate F5 crusher.

Long time ago I also gave a shot at intercooler.js, and seemed a very orthogonal, low-risk library to sprinkle pre-baked js into elements.  And found in HN that its author moved to develop htmx.

Fast forward to this week. The article "If not SPAs, what?" in HN brought up htmx again, and it was paired with alpine.js, tailwindcss, and others.   And it seems there's a kinda underground trend following the approach of totally detattched js/css on top of old classic Rails/Laravel/Django/YouNameIt. 

Maybe this time I'll swing along with the pendulum.

Systems, Fun, Code, Dread, Drag, Chaos, GOTO 10

Here's a weird post (the links are good though).

While usual ups and downs in life and work, I try to keep my information intake as regular as I can. When I keep reading and learning from the sources I know do bring me balance, I'm giving the opportunity to get back to my regular ok-state.

 Mood is a reinforcing feedback loop (self-optimizing machine), and if you don't cut it, it can tilt the system and change the equilibrium to a completely different point. And picking the right inputs help me slowing or reverting the feedback loop.

  Few weeks ago, by a friend's recommendation I watched this talk by Jens Mönig , and today this one from _why. And talk about learning, and the fun, and the big ideas that make our profession something like explorers, tinkerers. They both question some of the pains we take for granted as inherent complexity of programming, when they are mostly incidental.

  And it's "funny" I'm taking _why's inspiration, because at some point, he disappeared from the scene. Not sure about the reasons, but probably burnout? And we go to a grey-ish article about Surviving disillusionment.

  The Soul of A New Machine, we see a case of engineering, business, pressure, people enjoying their craft at the same time that they are suffering the extreme contraints of time, tech, decisions made from upwards. But they thrive. And thriving is also a reinforcing feedback loop.

  An internet person that helped me get up in a bump I had a few months ago is Jeremy Howard and his fastai courses and code. I saw him and I could easily take him as a model for how to code, approach problems, teach people, communicate, research (APL!), and even use vim! :) And it's very sad that he got bit by today's off-the-charts Code of Conduct policies and wrong-handling-gone-out-of-hand. I feel extremely sorry for him.

  Another thing that happened recently to me is reading CHAOS by James Gleick. And again, patterns from randomness. Learning about chaos in order and order in chaos. They are part of what we are.

  We like seeing patterns, seeing patterns when others just see noise. It's listening to jazz. And it takes time to teach your ear or eye on seeing those patterns.*

  You see a series of numbers, and there's interference. or the series does not stabilize anywhere. First thing you try to do is find a pattern. Do the numbers grow always? Do they alternate between positive and negative? Maybe they are converging?

  When things do not line up yet, you try to add a dimension there. Do they move faster every time (no matter if up or down)? Can I imagine the derivative of it being constant? or, is it the derivative of something that might have a pattern?

  Can, that derivative be seen as a series, and try to apply the first analysis again? is it always growing? more extreme?.....  (That feels like the enhanced optimization algorithm in "Why Functional Programming Matters").

  So, ups and downs come in patterns, and sometimes their ups and downs come from very concrete explainable things, and sometimes they form out of a small disruption, or they start a turbulence of crazy chaotic ups-downs.

  If not understanding it, can we foresee the chaos coming from a pattern of ups and downs? do we see a pattern, a f'(x), f''(x)? Are we approaching a singularity?

  Fuck if I know.


  * If we apply the learning lessons from _why and Jens, even if there has to be a basic intuition, it shouldn't be hard to see those patterns. But it is.

EDIT: https://hbr.org/2019/07/when-passion-leads-to-burnout. so true

Some Tcl

Wanna spend an afternoon learning a scripting language that you didn't know about?

 

Tcl has appeared in HN recently a couple of times, and every time I read about it I remember that great article by antirez showing some very cool features of Tcl. So The link that appeared in HN today was a book by Hal Abelson and Philip Greenspun. 

 

In the intro, It's funny how they compare Tcl and Lisp.

 

Anyway, the links: 

• http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html
  
• https://philip.greenspun.com/tcl/index.adp

An emacs' Feature Development

So, in https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-10/msg00691.html there's a proposal for an optimization in emacs, adding empty-directory-p so that elisp users don't have to (null (directory-files dir-name nil 'nodots t))).

And it makes sense to have a faster way. The person that proposed this improvement proposed a solution too. And it was a good one!

Then, Eli proposed something else. Some alternative implementation that:

• Allows to solve the problem at hand, 
• Reuses existing code by adding a 'limit' to directory-files
• Easier to implement
• Makes the implementation more stratified. You can still create empty-dir-p by calling directory-files
• in case of passing that limit count to directory-files, we still get a list of files instead of a boolean. It's richer information, in case we need it.
  

After that, the conversation goes on by trying to figure out if the partial list of files will be useful at some point, or it's adding indeterminism and no value, and finding a balance on simplicity and usefulness. 

All in all, a very good end-to-end conversation about a feature, its implications and its implementations with its corner cases and usability. Every time I see these conversations happening I feel this joy... I love when they happen in my team.

PS: Needless to say, this is a "simple" feature compared to bigger and more complex discussions going on in emacs-devel (which are hard problems that have no perfect solutions). But it's a good case study and there's something to be learned there about approaches, discussions, and building together.

Thanks to everyone involved!

Radicle: Secure peer-to-peer code collaboration without intermediaries

That's a pretty neat project I've stumbled upon. Radicle.

It tries to do a really distributed code management solution by building upon a few concepts I consider super interesting and rock solid. 

I'm gonna be throwing a few keywords that lighted up when reading about it (they might or might not appear as direct references in radicle's articles).: 

• Git 
• Merkle trees 
• P2P 
• gossip protocols 
• IPFS 
• Scuttlebut 
• pijul 
• nix 
• Rust 

 

That's a lot of cool stuff! I wish I had a bit more time, but lately I'm so much into Red language that I devote 80% of my free time to it. Still learning the basics of its toolchain, but it seems very impressive to me so far.

 

And here is something totally unrelated, but I enjoyed it so much I have to post it somewhere. A reverse engineering video of Contra (NES videogame from the 80's), with explanation of the konami code.

Ask Me Anything with Richard Gabriel, hosted by Stephen Kell

Listening to Dick Gabriel is such an experience of reflexion and deep thought.

tangling files with org-mode

I've been inspecting this repo https://github.com/kinnala/nixpkgs, and it was the first time I looked at the org tangling. Quite simple to do so:

Mostly using ":mkdirp yes :tangle path", is like doing a "cat block >>path". And you use (org-babel-tangle) as the exporter

#+begin_src elisp :mkdirp yes :tangle ~/.emacs
(org-babel-tangle)
#+end_src

export all variables in bash

If you have a prefix, the coolest way is like the following:

export ${!KONG_*}

If you want everything:

eval $(printenv | awk -F= '{ print "export " $1 }')

so JIT, WOW

This is so amazing I don't want to lose it:


A Smalltalk-80 VM written in LuaJIT, that boots the images from the eighties:
https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk#a-smalltalk-80-interpreted-virtual-machine-on-luajit

Approachable tutorial on JITs. The second part talks about metatracing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23740655

I recently discovered this guy and he's awesome. Haven't particularly examined this repo, but please, also check out his other stuff.
https://github.com/spencertipping/jit-tutorial

Checking Password Strength in 10 Lines

Talking about dependencies, there's this simple case:

To check password strength, we want different min lenghts for passwords depending if they have lower, upper, numbers, and simbols.

For this, there's passwdqc that allows you to do it in a very simple way,  but, do you really need a library?
Here's the minimalistic implementation I came up with, which I think is pretty decent, and again, has some nice property I can't quite describe.  The code is lua, but it can of course be translated to anything.

It has minimum lenghts for the passwords depending on the amount of different classes of characters it contains. If it only contains 1 type, we don't accept. for 2, minimum length 24,....
   local str = io.read('*l')
   local d = str:match("[0-9]") and 1 or 0
   local down = str:match("[a-z]") and 1 or 0
   local up = str:match("[A-Z]") and 1 or 0
   local s = str:match("[!@#$^&*()_=+-]") and 1 or 0
   local l = #str
   local defs = {math.huge, 24, 11, 9}
   print(d,down,up,s,l,l>=defs[d+down+up+s])

Some Thoughts on Ergonomics and Compression

A recent personal take on ergonomics and compression:

Why is vim so addictive, and somehow it's difficult to explain to non vim fanatics? I think it's a reification of the process of walking through a text file and doing stuff to it. A concrete way to talk about processes onto text files. Some feel it is strictly superior to GUIs because you can get ahold of it. you can write it down, put it in a postcard, and you have a handle to it. You type it again and it works. there's no syntax or fuzziness or stuff that can go wrong (TM).

Next question: Can you ahold an algorithm in your head? in the same concrete way you hold 'yypVr-'?

I'm lately quite interested in Array Languages and I'm reading some snippets of Apl/J/K. And the feeling is the same. Everything else looks so wasteful and error prone like the point-and-click looks to vimmers.

Example:
Shuffling a vector – breaking ⍵ down into ⍺ pieces from which another vector is built by merging. E.g. if is 'abcdefghij' and is 3, the pieces are 'abcd', 'efg', and 'hij', and the result is 'aehbficgjd':

⍵[⍋⍋(⍴⍵)⍴⍳⍺]

The ergonomics are pretty different from what we're used to, but there's definitely an emergent property there. It's not just "it's shorter to type".

Perl & Ruby do APL

So recently I saw a couple of posts that mention APL approaches to problems. The cool thing is that I saw those in a Perl related forum and a Ruby one.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBl6t7zNfwE
- https://zverok.github.io/blog/2020-05-16-ruby-as-apl.html

Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine

I've enjoyed this talk so much I'm gonna post it here: Great as always, Damian Conway doing his particular 'GEB' on physics and programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORjyXcLDd9M


Also, Keep Ruby Weird 2018, the same as !!Con, very interesting talks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v32XHJxljKI&list=PLE7tQUdRKcyaxIbXihF5bRdMumqVtGrT4&index=5

 

EDIT: 2020-11-10. Found https://marak.com/blog/2013-05-13-time-loop-software

Recreational vimming

When I have to do some sort of development or file editing inside a container, I usually have vim there but not emacs. docker-tramp is very useful but sometimes I just want to edit there.
The .vimrc I have in my container has only one line (I can't function without it):

imap jk 

Let's say I'm editing a lua script. After I've saved and c-z and run the file several times, I realize what I want is to have is:

:nore ,rr :!lua %

Then I can test it much quicker. But I realize I'm always :w before,rr. Colon, up, and modify the line to:

:nore ,rr :w:!lua %

Accidentally I quit vim and realize I have to set that again, so I go to my vimrc and add this:

nore ,rr :w:!lua %
nore ,vimrc :e ~/.vimrc
nore ,so :source ~/.vimrc

With this I have a pretty nice way to iteratively finetune my config. After some lua editing, the only thing I need to do often (and not provided by the excellent vim default functionality) is to comment and uncomment code.

nore ,cc :s/^/--/
nore ,cu :s/^\( *\)--/\1/

This gives normal and visual comment/uncomment functionality, and enough interactivity to build your ad-hoc shortcuts as you go.
This is an example that just happened yesterday, and the nice thing is that it grows and flows from 0. I couldn't get to this amount of functionality from an emacs -Q in such a small time. It has such a different feeling to configuring emacs. It reminds me of my Perl days, it's fun and quick. And the language is very orthogonal, with very few abstractions. It's the APL of text editing.

This is my take on this reddit thread. 

What's in a git merge conflict?

There's something that was bothering me lately about git conflicts:

How come git knows which side is which, and when there is a conflict or where there isn't?

I have the notion of the common ancestor to base the versions off of, but when people do heavy cherry-picking (which is mostly a single branch operation).... how come git reconciles the contents?

Well... as usual, things in git are..... simpler?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4920885/what-constitutes-a-merge-conflict-in-git

John Conway's Game of Life

John Conway passed away recently, so let's look at his Game of Life from the APL/J/K perspective.

https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/eem/life.htm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22845249
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

And a recent ode to J, that explains the first prototype that Arthur Withney and Ken Iverson wrote in an afternoon. I remember having great fun deciphering it 3 years ago on the flights back and from $WORK at that time, and people staring at me reading that printed code and WTFing.

Indeterminate dimensionality

From: http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html
 

Scientists like to be able to locate things by giving a ``vector'', that is, a list of coordinates in a space of known dimensionality. This is one of the reasons they like orthogonality--it means the various components of the vector are independent of each other. Unfortunately, the real world is not usually set up to work that way. Most problems, including linguistics problems, are a matter of ``getting from here to there'', and the geography in-between has a heavy influence on which solutions are practical. Problems tend to be solved at several levels. A typical journey might involve your legs, your car, an escalator, a moving sidewalk, a jet, maybe some more moving sidewalks or a tram, another jet, a taxi, and an elevator. At each of these levels, there aren't many ``right angles'', and the whole thing is a bit fractal in nature. In terms of language, you say something that gets close to what you want to say, and then you start refining it around the edges, just as you would first plan your itinerary between major airports, and only later worry about how to get to and from the airport.

Simplicity is its own reward

This is 3 top level hackers discussing about a patch that Stefan proposed to an already solved problem (I guess originally by Daniel, or someone else, but Daniel is anyway the father of the pdump feature).

Amazingly classy and to the point. All 3. I'm learning so much reading this maillist. And still a lot to learn.

Bravo, and thanks.


Stefan Monnier: >> Any objection?
>
Eli Zaretskii: > What are the advantages?  The original problem is solved, and
> everybody agreed that having a dead buffer in the pdumped area is
> nothing we should bother about.
>

Daniel Colascione: With Stefan's patch, Emacs is simpler. Simplicity is its own reward.

Original thread: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-03/msg00922.html

personal journals

 I've been sorta writting a personal engineering journal for some time now, and it's quite valuable. The most productive people I know rule their lives via bullet lists, and journals.

Here are some recent links talking bout them. Also, if you look for org-mode articles, you'll find some interesting workflows.

• https://fs.blog/2014/02/decision-journal/
• https://blog.trello.com/decision-journal
• https://neilkakkar.com/the-human-log.html
• https://neilkakkar.com/How-to-see-Systems-in-everyday-life.html

Links on JITs

If you're interested in JITs, here I leave some recent links that talk about different approaches and techniques. I don't understand many of them, but they might be useful for future reference.

• https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/03/28/jitu-brutus.html
• https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/01/20/mir-a-lightweight-jit-compiler-project/
• https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22711391

TRAMP with docker is awesome

There's this recent post in reddit where the author shows how to chain tramp connections. And it's great indeed!

What I'm using TRAMP more often for is to login to containers.

Using docker-tramp, I usually browse into a docker and start dired there. But then, I can open a shell (or eshell if there's no bash) there.

And, for example, if you run a postgres container, why not opening a `sql-postgres` buffer?.

Just:

docker run -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=a -e POSTGRES_USER=rgrau -ti --rm postgres

and when dired-ing through tramp, m-x sql-postrgres using the appropriate params.  Tada!

Neat, ain't it?

Happy hacking, and stay safe.

pipes on steroids

I though I had blogged about that before, but I can't find it anywhere, so I'm just gonna put it here (again?).

Pipes are great. You know that, I know that, everyone knows that. Because/But they are restricted to linear, non conditional flow.

Sometimes, I'd like to have an out-of-band pipe that bypasses a command in the middle, and there's no clear way how to do it.

So here are a few links on how to use file descriptors for advanced use cases. You can use them for this, and for other smart stuff in shells.

• https://catonmat.net/bash-one-liners-explained-part-three
• https://wiki.bash-hackers.org/howto/redirection_tutorial
• http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ioredirintro.html
• http://catern.com/posts/pipes.html
• https://mosermichael.github.io/jq-illustrated/dir/content.html
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700014 ( https://www2.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/sw/dgsh/ )
• http://dongyuxuan.me/posts/pipeline.html 
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2990414/echo-that-outputs-to-stderr
• http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/io-redirection.html
• http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/howto/redirection_tutorial 
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704774

reverse engineering courses

Maybe one day I'll get back to reverse engineering. Just in case that happens, I'm just stashing useful links:

https://pwn.college/
https://guyinatuxedo.github.io/

not all containers are made equal

So if you want to give another spin to your container knowledge, you know there are a few projects that relate to containers and are not just docker.

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd-nspawn
- https://voidlinux.org/news/2017/12/advent-containers.html
- https://www.infoq.com/articles/containers-hypervisors-2019/
- https://github.com/p8952/bocker
- https://dev.to/napicella/containers-from-scratch-in-18-lines-of-code-3pmn
- https://ericchiang.github.io/post/containers-from-scratch/
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15608435
- https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog/2020/02/docker-images-part1-reducing-image-size.html

And here is a cool 'build-your-own-docker' talk

Larry Tesler RIP, Bert Sutherland RIP

Very sad week for our field. Two great great great pioneers on the computer science, human-computer-interface, and thought advancing concepts left the analogic world.

There are a bunch of stories in these HN links:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370667

Transitive closure in k, and more

I found this gist on finding reachable nodes in a graph super entertaining. Every time I read on APL/J/K I feel this intense deep puzzle solving that heats my brain a little bit, but feels awesome when you arrive at the end. And it all makes sense there.

About 10 years ago I was having those feelings with the Shwartzian transform and JAPHs around the net.  Perl is the gateway drug.



Btw, if you want some more, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7Mt0GYHU9A or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzPd3umu78g .

spicing up your prompt

I've been using this very silly overloading of the prompt for some time, and even though it's dead simple, it gets to cheer me up sometimes.

On every emacs startup, and every 24 hours, you get  a different message on your prompt when 'm-x'.

Happy hacking,

disable screen blank/sleep on idle

I've finally switched to more barebones linux distros again. Now I'm on NixOS and Void.

Void is minimalist and lightweight, with a textual installation process, like vectorlinux had (using text dialogs and menus).

I just found out that the way to keep the screen from going blank after some mouse/keyboard idle time is  xset s off -dpms. That saves you from any ad-hoc command line fu when watching movies with that girl.

Latest Awesome Emacs Developments

In the last month or so, a great wealth of new Emacs stuff has been developing in both core and community.

We know that in free software projects (communities, that is) some branches might take a long time to develop, but some others

tree-sitter: Integrating this project opensourced by github. This could mean a new way of syntax highlight that doesn't drag, smarter indentation, and completions. Eli mentioned it in the emacs mail list and people are looking into it.

Yet another jitter, by Andrea Corrallo.  Another approach to make emacs' elisp code run faster.  There have already been many attempts to this (Guilemacs, "El Compilador", and others). Will this be the one?  From the highest level perspective, I like "el compilador" the most, because it's kinda smalltalkish, but hey,... I don't have the knowledge to hack on any of those, so whatever the wizards pick, I'm good with it. Also, see mailing list.

SystemE : Replace Systemd with runit? nope, geekier.

Emacs Application Framework because you can also have proper gui controls.
 
Animations in elisp (text)

OM. higher level org parsing

doct declarative org-capture templates.

More META-II

So there's a new article on the internet about META-II!  And not just that, but it also talks about Forth!  And not just that, but it also talks about raku!


That thing alone already deserves a detailed browsing of the whole blog.