Not so long ago I’ve written about Paredit and its quirks. I’ve been happily using Smartparens ever since that post, but something still bugged me. I was constantly thinking about the fact that Smartparens has numerous quirks in various languages and some known bugs that are unlikely to be fixed in the foreseeable future, given that the main maintainer doesn’t have a lot of spare time.

Lua is one of the most pleasant languages that I’ve used so far. Well, I’m not writing in Lua directly, instead, I use Fennel - a compiler for a Clojure/Lisp-like syntax to Lua. Because of that, I actually don’t really know Lua syntax that well, even though it’s really simple, it still has some quirks.

Some blogs I read occasionally post monthly and yearly status updates. From now on I’ve decided to do a recap of what’s happened during the year, to see what I’ve achieved, and maybe plan something for the upcoming year as well. So without further ado, let’s jump straight to January 2021!

Lately, I’ve been into understanding asynchronous programming. Since my background is mostly bare metal C, which has no asynchronous programming whatsoever (apart from running on multiple chips, and communicating via shared memory), and I did only a little bit of C++ and Rust, it’s fair to say, that async is pretty new for me.

Today’s topic will be about lazy sequences and how these are different from iterators. I’ve wanted to make an article on this topic for some time, but unfortunately, there was no good way to show the differences using a single language (that I know), because usually, languages stick to one of those things.

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.