Here’s a quick rant, kinda. I’ve become a huge fan of structural editing recently. My structural editing journey was maybe a bit unusual, but I’ve finally settled on Smartparens for quite some time. Originally I was introduced to structural editing by Parinfer mode which had some Paredit functionality, so it got me interested.

Not long ago I posted a small article on a Condition System in Clojure language. In that article, I was mostly trying to understand what a condition system is, and how it can enhance error handling in the code I write. Since that time, I’ve understood this system a lot better, by actually trying it in the Common Lisp language, the place where it came from, as far as I know.

I started using IRC in the early 2000s and was primarily using it because at that time there was no global internet access in our city. However we had a city-wide local network, and our internet provider ran an IRC server for everyone to chat.

A while ago I’ve watched this amazing talk: Condition Systems in an Exceptional Language by Chris Houser. And more recently I’ve found one interesting library called farolero, which provides a set of functions and macros that mimic Common Lisp’s condition system. So I was generally interested in the topic and decided to give it a shot and try both approaches.

Today we’ll take a look at an interesting Java library, called PF4J, which describes itself as a Plugin Framework for Java. The main purpose of this library is to provide a way of detecting, initializing, and using plugins to extend your Java application with new features without the need to modify the code.

Update: All the patches1​, 2​ has been merged into the main branch of Fennel language, so expect to see improved fennelview in next stable release! Some semantics have been altered, so I’ve updated the post a bit to reflect the changes.

Programming languages come in all shapes and sizes. There are pretty simple languages and really complex ones. But what unites most of these languages is the syntax. There are many languages so-called C-like, as they share many syntax ideas with C language, which includes consistent indentation, grouping, scoping, and infix notation.

Previously I decided to implement a rather basic raycasting engine in ClojureScript. It was a lot of fun, an interesting experience, and ClojureScript was awesome. I’ve implemented a small labyrinth game and thought about adding more features to the engine, such as camera shake, and wall height change.

Today’s topic will again be about text editing software (one of my favorite topics actually). However, instead of discussing text editors themselves, I’ll share my opinion on such things as editor-hopping. What is editor-hopping? It’s, well, when you change text editors every day/week/month/year.

For a long time, I was a fan of Hack font. It has really nice language support, great readability at a size of 9pt, and zero with a dot. I love it when zero comes with a dot. Many fonts use zero with a line, to differentiate it from capital O, but on small sizes, it is not great, however, a dot looks fine when both small and big.