Tag: Internet Finds

H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery

This is a pointless, but fun investigation of why some the letters “H” above the entrance of Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Unity Temple church in Chicago are up-side-down. The author tries to track down historical documents and pictures to reconstruct the history of the when those letters were put up and maybe taken down … and to ultimately see how far back the mistake goes.

Current

Terry Godier has found a great metaphor for a feed reader: a current. It leaves the shadow of mail clients and models feeds as currents with different velocities: automatically drifting by and fading away if unread. While moving away from traditional mail-like UI concepts feeds are still presented in-order (in contrast to social media-like “curated” feeds).

I like the idea and how far the metaphor carries and applies to all the technical and usability bits. It’ll take time to see if it really “holds water,” 😜 but I’m intrigued.

The Worst Programming Language of All Time

You can argue that C++ shares this honor with the likes of JavaScript and TeX. Among them only JavaScript managed to design itself out of the mess it was in the early-to-mid 2000s. There’re still the ugly parts, but each new iteration actually improved the language as a whole. All while keeping backward compatibility. Well, TeX is odd and idiosyncratic, but it’s a “niche” language. And then there’s C++ … which managed to become more and more of a mess the more they tried to “improve” it. Making big blunders in designing features, failing to rectify them in a timely manner and then cowardly leaving “broken” features in the language to preserve backward compatibility. *sigh*

Here’s a great collection of grievances:

While many of the features are useful and necessary for a modern language, all the pieces are so shoddily Frankensteined together it is hilarious.

Just the amount of “separate” Turing-complete languages it contains is out of this world: C++, its C subset, Macros, Templates, Exceptions, constexpr/consteval, co-routines. All with separate syntax, semantics, inconsistencies and foot guns and no coherent design.

And even after all that it’s still missing essential pieces for software development like dependency and build management which the specification doesn’t even acknowledge as relevant. 🤯 This leading to weird edge cases like ODR violations or “ill-formed, NDR”-like atrocities, which was summarized best in a CppCon talk:

This is a language which has false positives for the question “was this a program?”

What is C++ – Chandler Carruth, Titus Winters – CppCon 2019 at 13:23

Simulating Statically Compiled Binaries in Glorified Tarballs

Containers won for one reason: they simulate a statically compiled binary that’s ergonomic for engineers and transparent to the application. A Docker image is a glorified tarball with metadata in a JSON document.

From Joseph’s comment on “Containers and giving up on expecting good software installation practices”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but from a developer’s perspective it makes sense. It may not be incidental that the new programming languages of the 2010s (e.g. Go, Rust, Zig) produce statically linked binaries by default.

I always thought of containers as a way to add standardized interfaces to an application/binary that can be configured in a common way (e.g. ports, data directories, configurationenv vars, grouping and isolation). The only other ecosystem that does this and maybe even goes a little further is Nix.

Because the binary format itself is ossified and the ecosystem fragmented enough we missed the train for advanced lifecycle hooks for applications (think multiple entry points for starting, pausing, resuming, stopping, reacting to events, etc. like on Android, iOS, MacOS) … in Linux this is something that’s again bolted on from the outside: with e.g. D-Bus, Systemd, CRIU).

Gebrauchsanmaßung ohne Zueignungsabsicht

Juristen haben echt grandiose Wörter 😂:

Zueignungsabsicht, f.

Die Absicht einer Person beschreibt, sich eine Sache wenigstens vorübergehend anzueignen bei gleichzeitigem Vorsatz, den Berechtigten um die Sache dauerhaft zu enteignen (siehe Diebstahl, Unterschlagung).
— Wikipedia

Gebrauchsanmaßung, f.

Eine vorübergehende eigenmächtige (und damit unberechtigte) Nutzung von beweglichen Sachen unter zeitweiliger Brechung fremden Gewahrsams. Gemeint ist, dass die Sache zwar unberechtigt benutzt, dem Berechtigten später aber zurückgebracht wird.
— Wikipedia

Ich bin durch einen News-Artikel über diese Wörter gestolpert.