Web

Syntax highlighting is having something of a moment. Three posts have popped up on my feed: Niki is sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong Words and Buttons speak about Lexical differential highlighting Hillel Wayne complains that Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel. Sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong In the first post Niki allows themselves to wander a little from the main point with several interesting syntax-highlighting related points. However, I think the main point is made with: ...

An interesting post on the Unplanned Obsolescence blog.I’ve asked before what dynamically typed languages are good for and one answer I’ve come up with is meta-programming. In the linked post the answer is essentially ‘glue’ code. It is very much worth reading the entire thing, but the author is firstly making the claim that you should mostly stick to using the web DSLs, rather than language extensions/frameworks that seek to abstract away from those DSLs. The DSLs in question are HTML, CSS, and SQL. The author then states, that when you have to glue between these DSLs in your general purpose programming language you are necessarily crossing type boundaries, as a result, you mostly lose the guarantees of a statically typed language, but that statically typed language forces you through some hoops which ultimately obscures the actual logic of what you’re attempting to achieve. ...

A good summation post perfect web app from Matyáš Racek’s blog yoyo-code. I think this neatly sums up how difficult it is to write a good, well working web application. It’s good to have all this in one place. In particular I think this nicely shows some of the trade-offs between traditional server-side rendered multi-page applications and client-side rendered single-page applications. For example: It [the app] should work in a limited way offline. and The app should work without JavaScript enabled (progressive enhancement) Those are both not straightforward on their own, and pretty difficult to achieve both at the same time. ...