This year certainly was a productive one for me. I’ve written ~40 posts, have many more in the works, made a few new projects in Fennel and Clojure, and changed more of how I spend my time overall. The last year’s recap I mentioned that I’m no longer available on most social networks - this certainly helps me keep a more healthy mental state.

The title says it all. No, really, I’m astonished at how much software is basically useless without an internet connection. Net is no longer something additional to your daily tasks, it is essential for your daily tasks. Just recently, I installed GSConnect, a GNOME addon that implements the KDE Connect protocol.

I decided to give Janet another look - I’ve mentioned Janet before in this blog, and I have my thoughts on it. However, I have never actually interacted with the language that much - I only read its documentation and some code.

Have you tried using the GNOME Software? This thing: Do you use it? Are you even using GNOME? Oh, sorry, I think should point this out, it’s kinda important - I’m asking the developers of GNOME Software. Because, apparently, they don’t. OK, let’s start this post over.

Today I would like to discuss the Crafting Interpreters book by Robert Nystrom. It’s a book about designing an interpreter for a dynamic programming language called Lox. Well, not exactly. It’s split into two parts - in the first is about crafting a tree-walking interpreter, and the second is about writing a complete bytecode VM.

I’m feeling ranty this week for some reason. Today will be no different and I’ll post another rant on the software world but not about programming. Instead, I want to tip into the consumer application world, and shit on the current state of music players on GNU/Linux specifically, although the situation is as bad as on other platforms IMO.

Tree-sitter became more widespread and Emacs took notice and included a bunch of <lang>-ts-mode as alternatives to <lang>-mode into the core. This is good news and a welcome change, but I have some concerns about the approach. When I first saw the Tree-sitter talk by Max Brunsfeld I was concerned that the language highlighting “fix” they’re talking about is too much.

I don’t get it - it’s the simplest way to enable dark mode for your website that works across all platforms. It works on Linux, Android, MacOS, iOS, and maybe even on Windows (I didn’t test it, I have no Windows). I see websites that either use JS to do that or do no dark mode at all.

In the last post on the subject I mentioned: …And yeah, I felt burned up a lot, and considered skipping a month maybe… So, yeah. I left the jam. And I’m stopping my gamedev marathon as well. Realizing that it was a struggle rather than a self-motivation attempt helped to make the decision.

…if you’re an Emacs user, that is. You know, it’s funny, because people have opinions on why you don’t need a terminal on entirely different ends of a spectrum. It’s like that IQ chart meme: Figure 1: *That’s Visual Studio on the left, not VS Code