James Cash's blog

Well, it’s been a while since my session at Recurse (see my previous post) finished and I wanted to write some more about my “graphics in Prolog” experiment went.

How I Got Here Today ends my first week at the Recurse Centre (remotely) and it’s been a very enjoyable experience thus far.

In Search of Lost Time: Volume IV - Cities of the Plain - Marcel Proust Continuing the series from last year.

As I’ve been writing about here for a while now, I quite like Prolog as a general-purpose programming language.

I’ve spent a lot of my life with my baseline mood being “unhappy”.

For some reason, a memory returned to me today of how I would write Haskell when I first learned it, in 2007 or so.

I’ve been using Mastodon as my only social media for a while now.

Today I had a need to be able to efficiently look up mappings from a range to a value in Prolog.

My Prolog LSP server has recently gained a new feature – the ability to automatically format code.

Inspired by maya.land, I decided to do something a little bit more interesting with my site’s layout.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbons I’d read the abridgement in 2017, but I decided last year to give the whole thing a go.

This post is a bit of a departure from what I “usually” write here; not so much technical or exploring an idea, just my story of how I fell into the world of stationery.

I’ve used Rust a tad a number of years ago and found it fine, but recently decided I wanted to give it a go again and see what it’s like these days.

Station Eleven - Emily St.

When I first came across the idea of “utility-class” CSS “frameworks” (the first one I recall hearing about was called “Tachyon”), I didn’t think much of them.

Last summer, my dad and I finally did something we’d been talking about for something like twenty years and got our scuba diving certifications.

My recent reading has taken me on a bit of tour of Western philosophy.

There’s so much discourse around the new class of “large language models” (henceforth “LLM”s) going around that I feel compelled to write my thoughts out.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years - David Graeber One of the best books I’ve ever read.

Our vacation in Washington state didn’t go exactly as we expected.

Unicode Input Vexingly, there isn’t really a straight-forward way for a keyboard to send “👍”.

Last time, I talked about the process that led me to building my “automake” tool for Prolog.

I’ve been gradually building some little tools for myself to enhance the web development experience in Prolog.

The Club - Leo Damrosch Not exactly what I was expecting, but very enjoyable.

I recently came across a neat article about calculating the Levenshtein distance between strings in Clojure.

Premises Two somewhat-contradictory ideas that I hold: Too many people in the tech world make too much of a fetish of “minimalism” Too many people in the tech world vastly over-complicate things.

Last year, I decided I wanted to get more comfortable writing fiction.

New Things For no particular reason other than wanting to try something new, I’ve migrated away from Helm to a completion setup for Emacs based on Protesilaos’ latest config (see prot-minibuffer.el).

First, A Note Last year, I experimented with making some videos about Emacs.

There’s been another rash of discussion about the challenges of making FLOSS software, this time sparked off by the problem of funding Babel.

Nature’s Building Blocks - John Emsley Re-read of a very fun book, talking about all the elements and interesting facts about each one.

I took a crack at making a video version of my previous post on customizing the mode-line in Emacs.

In this week’s video, I discuss some little gotchas with vim-style keybindings with Emacs in Evil-mode.

This week’s little video is on taking advantage of Emacs’ introspective abilities to see what functions are being invoked, how they work, and changing them.

A short little video about my workflow for reading books with pdf-tools and org-pdftools in Emacs.

My previous video on Emacs went fairly well, so I tried making another: This one touches on some more specific details on how I customize Helm & how to create custom Helm sources.

I tried making a little video explaining how I organize my Emacs configuration.

When teaching “programming”, a surprisingly small amount of time is spent actually helping students with logic – and a lot helping them learning & managing programming tools.

I often advocate to people that I’m helping learn programming that they should learn more programming languages.

What is Bard?

One of the concepts in programming that I found most challenging to learn is the “continuation”.

The Worldly Philosophers - Robert L.

For no particular reason, I decided to try to add support for JSON Feed for my blog here.

After more than a decade of using Emacs, I finally released my first package.

Previously I’d set up a system to read email in Emacs before, using notmuch, which I quite liked.

As a consequence of the fact that I got in to Prolog not through what seems like the more typical academic route, but via Anne Ogborne’s great tutorial on using Prolog for web applications, I think I missed out on some of the fundamentals of the language.

Short version: I wrote a Prolog language server implementation – give it a try!

The Very Short Version: If you’re going to open an input file stream in SWI-Prolog, then pass that stream to a foreign function that’s going to use the file descriptor, make sure you open it with bom(false) – e.g. open(File, read, Stream, [bom(false)]), s…

I recently read a fascinating book by Christopher Alexander (and others) entitled A Pattern Language.

While Helm is an invaluable part of the way I use Emacs, I find it not particularly obvious how to extend it, often having to resort to reading a lot of the code to figure out how things work.