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.

Modern text editors usually operate in one instance. When I select some advanced text editor as my preferred editor in the system, I expect this to happen: I click on some files in the file manager; If there’s no editor instance opened, a new instance opens with the file ready to edit; If there is an instance of an editor opened somewhere, a file is being opened in it, and the editor is brought to me via some focus event.

Another good service is going to be shut down by Google. I was a happy user of Google Play Music (GPM) for a long time, and although it had some problems, I still enjoyed it. It has a decent web interface, and a fine mobile app, but most importantly I’ve listened to a lot of new music every day, and my library constantly evolved, thanks to Google recommendation systems, which is actually good.

While working on my previous post I was mainly using Emacs, because it has the best support for Lisp languages. It has great integration with the REPL, can run a server for my application in the background, and so on. And actually, I use this a lot while working on this blog - I run hugo process in the background to see how my page is looking.