Unrelated - it looks like your blog's RSS feed isn't up to date. :-)
Thank you!
Readit Newssramsay commented on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C? stephenramsay.net/posts/v... · Posted by u/sramsay
sramsay commented on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C? stephenramsay.net/posts/v... · Posted by u/sramsay
That's what this discussion made me think of. To take it further -- if you were going to design a language expressly for AI-generated code, what might some of it's features be?
I think strong static typing probably? Which is, well, not javascript in fact! (And I have bucked the trend on this previously, liking ruby -- but I'm not sure I'd want AI-generated code without it?)
Author, here. This is exactly the question I was trying (perhaps ineptly) to pose: If we designed a programming language with the idea that it would be primarily or exclusively vibe coded, what would that language look like? Might it look something more like Lean? Or more like theorem provers in general? Or would it look more like a natural language PL (think Inform 7)? Or what about a heavily declarative DSL like FAUST (for audio DSP)?
None of our existing programming languages were designed for quite the circumstance in which contemporary programming now finds itself; they all address an ergonomic situation in which there are humans and machines (not humans, machines, and LLMs).
It's possible, I suppose that the only PL that makes sense here is the one the LLMs "knows" best, but I sort of doubt that that makes sense over the long term. And I'm repeating myself, but really, it seems to me that a language that was written entirely for the ergonomic situation of human coders without any consideration of LLMs is not addressing the contemporary situation. This is not a precise analogy, but it seems to me a little like the difference between a language that was designed before vs after multicore -- or before vs after the internet.
Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?
There might be. And I certainly bear no ill will of any kind toward the project or its devs. But I am in terminals all day long, and I hesitate to use one that is written in a language that hasn't yet hit 1.0.
Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.
sramsay commented on Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h) hwisnu.bearblog.dev/givin... · Posted by u/mithcs
Outside of hobbyist things, performance-critical code is the only responsible use case for a non-memory safe language like C in 2025, so of course it does. (Even that window is rapidly closing, though; languages like Rust and Swift can be better than C for perf-critical things because of the immutability guarantees.)
I keep hearing this, but I fail to see why "the massive, well-maintained set of critical libraries upon which UNIX is based" is not a good reason to use C in 2025.
I have never seen a language with a better ffi into C than C.
Truly, one of the most original artists of our time. I am among those who think Einstein on the Beach is one of the greatest theatrical works of the twentieth century, but I don't think I ever saw a Wilson piece that didn't completely blow my mind.
I seem to recall an interview in which he said that he didn't think many of his works should be revived. I hope that's not true, and that his pieces have a long life in repertory.
sramsay commented on Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered phys.org/news/2025-07-hym... · Posted by u/wglb
Thank you. Without this source, it's hard to separate the facts from the bullshit in what was posted on phys.org.
I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.
"Legend has it that Noah hid them here from the floodwaters before boarding the ark." This article is supposed to be popular science about Babylonian archaeology, why mix it with a Hebrew myth derived from an older Mesopotamian myth? I guess it's just because Noah appeals to the ambient Christian culture. In other words, it's nonsense, but it sells.
"The information about the women of Babylon, their role as priestesses and the associated tasks, has also astonished experts, as no texts describing these things were previously known." There are many many texts about women and Naditu (sacred women) in Mesopotamia and in Babylon. According to the scholar article : "The passage has great importance for understanding the roles played by the various classes of priestesses: ugbakkātu, nadâtu, and qašdātu." Quite different.
> I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.
Well, I am a scholar, and if you mean "Noah clearly did not hide these texts," then yes. Of course, that is ridiculous.
But it's actually a crucial bit of information if you're a humanist scholar. The article doesn't say anything about it, but the question would be: Which tradition recorded this legend about these texts? Almost any answer is important, because one culture trying to legitimate its own literary traditions or those of another through its own myths or those of another is absolute gold. It helps us to understand the way literary and religious syncretism unfolded (or failed to unfold) in the ancient near east and in later epochs . . .
sramsay commented on Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin simonwillison.net/2025/Ju... · Posted by u/mustache_kimono
Maybe my memory is bad, but I don't remember people jumping ship from CGI-bin because of performance. I do remember a lot of security problems.
I remember megatons of Java Servlet(tm) hype convincing us that real programmers do OO.
Java remains the only programming language I've ever heard covered in a feature story for NPR.
sramsay commented on The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001) openculture.com/2025/06/t... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
Delia Derbyshire
Laurie Spiegel
It's a bit fuzzy in where the boundaries are for the category represented by the list.
Actually, what's amazing is that many of the people being mentioned fit within any coherent statement of the boundaries. Schaeffer is on it but not Radigue? When it said, "There's few women," I didn't think they meant it leaves off Oliveros!
When translating ancient Greek in class, one often slips into a weird translation-ese that would be pretty funny if you didn't know what was going on. You end up saying things like: "The going-into-the-temple men were on the one hand brave and on the other hand afraid."