Jesse @jesselawson@mastodon.technology

Wait, Angelfire is still a thing?

https://www.angelfire.lycos.com/

Let's say we want to take patterns of two characters and replace them with a single-byte flag to compress a code file of any language.

With about 95 unique symbols in total, we use the combination formula to get the total number of possible tokens: C = 95! / ( 2!(95-2)! ) = 4,465. Divide that by 255 -- the maximum number of unique int values a single byte can store -- and we have the worst compression algorithm I've ever designed.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Designing programming languages is closer to symbolic interactionism than I thought.

I want to implement the testing system first. It would be really fun to write tests in the language up to where you've implemented support to test that functionality correctly.

I'm working on a language prototype where JSON and URLs are first-class citizens.

You can do stuff like this:

```
metadata = https://some.tld/config.json;

print metadata['somekey']
```

The idea is that URLs resolve to expressions that are of their type. The above example would have `metadata` become a JSON type.

It's a modular language, and the first module I'm writing is support for markdown.

"If megascale is what gives Facebook its power, and what makes it dangerous, collective action against the web as it is today is necessary for change."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/facebook-doomsday-machine/617384/

In this free online book, we'll learn about Rust while building a rudimentary Markdown compiler—a command-line interface tool that takes a Markdown file as input, converts it to HTML, and writes that HTML to another file.

Read online: https://jesselawson.github.io/getting-started-with-rust/

#rust #programming

A general-purpose language where the compiler returns errors and warnings as Slack messages randomly throughout the night.

I recently republished my book on getting started with Rust by building what is essentially a markdown-to-html transpiler.

https://jesselawson.github.io/getting-started-with-rust/

Over the past few days I have been writing a bytecode VM for a custom language idea I've had, and as much fun as I'm having with C for prototyping a general-purpose language, I can't help but wonder how much faster this all would be if I would just use Rust + Pest....