Nicolas Martyanoff – Brain dump

You have a Common Lisp program running, multiple threads listening for network connections, others processing data in the background.

Common Lisp pathnames, used to represent file paths, have the reputation of being hard to work with.

Multiple Emacs modes recognize URIs so that you can follow them in a web browser, usually with a mouse left click.

The canonical name of a Go module is its path.

So you have a server storing objects in a relational database, and an API, nowadays probably HTTP but it does not matter.

Common Lisp programming is often presented as “interactive”.

Edit (2023-06-19) Updated to mention the +Bd option.

Introduction If you have already used functional languages, you are probably familiar with fold, a high order function used to iterate on a collection of values to combine them and return a result.

I have been using Ngrok for almost two years in order to test webhooks during development.

IELM is the Emacs Lisp REPL.

Workspaces are a feature introduced in March 2022 with Go 1.18.

A good line counting program has two features: it only counts non-empty lines to get a fair estimate of the size of a project, and it groups line counts by file type to help see immediately which languages are used.

At the end of 2021 I quitted my job to create a company with an ex-colleague.

Like so many people, I use Gmail.

Font Lock is the builtin Emacs minor mode used to highlight textual elements in buffers.

Much has been written on Common Lisp; there is rarely one year without someone proclaming the death of the language and how nobody uses it anymore.

While Common Lisp has functions to open, read and write files, none of them takes care of reading and returning the entire content.

I have used text editors for more than 20 years; in all that time, I have never used a templating system to generate content because copy pasting and replacing always felt good enough.

Dired is an Emacs mode providing an interactive interface to navigate and manipulate files.

I was recently reminded of the ability of Emacs Calc to perform computations on values with units.

While SLIME is most of the time able to indent Common Lisp correctly, it will sometimes trip on custom forms.

My friend Rémi found an Emacs package developed by Tecosaur to take screenshots of your code.

I was working on the terminal output for a Common Lisp logger, and I realized that SLIME does not interpret ANSI escape sequences.

While I mostly use SBCL for Common Lisp development, I regularly switch to CCL or even ECL to run tests.

All my code is stored in various Git repositories.

I have been having completion issues in Eshell for some time, and I decided to fix it.

Org-mode is what got me into Emacs in the first place.

The SLIME Emacs package for Common Lisp supports cross-referencing: one can list all references pointing to a symbol, move through this list and jump to the source code of each reference.

I have been using Projectile for years, and it served me well.

I have used the C-l shortcut in ZSH to clear the screen for as long as I can remember.

I just encountered the strangest behaviour in Emacs.

Paredit is an Emacs package for structural editing.

I recently went back to Common Lisp to solve the daily problems of the Advent of Code.

In the default Emacs configuration, C-l is bound to recenter-top-bottom.

Storing credentials and confidential data in a secure location is important, and I have been happy with 1Password for years.

Edit (2023-02-07) Updated to mention subkey selection during renewal.

The Erlang logger application introduced in OTP 21 is extremely flexible, but the default settings are not the most practical for development purposes: The default log level is notice, meaning that info and debug messages will not be printed.

I use Dialyzer a lot, and it has always been useful to expose various errors in my Erlang code.

The CLHS, or Common Lisp HyperSpec, is one of the most important resource for any Common Lisp developer.

The usual way to develop programs in Common Lisp is to use SLIME in Emacs, which starts an implementation and provides a REPL.

While the erl application is really useful to tinker with Erlang modules, the lack of a persistent history has always been annoying.

I am used to read RFC documents in Emacs by opening them as simple text files.

I have been learning a lot about Erlang recently, and I stumbled upon a strange behaviour: printing strings containing non-ascii characters, e.g.

I have been using Emacs for some time, and ido has always been my favourite way to switch buffers.