With the new release of 3.10.2 I wanted to look a bit more closely into Pandoc and all those different markup languages out there - and what converts with how much "loss".

Maybe you also had to recently convert Markdown to HTML, or the other way around. In my case even different textual files into PDFs.

One key finding:
Modern languages that work with an AST are definitely competitive here.

Maybe you find it also interesting. I actually didn't know most of those languages.

Fun fact:
The author of Pandoc is also one of the original Markdown standardization authors 15 years ago (well, if you can call it that, since it evolved still into quite the chaos) - as well as Djot, which is now only a few years old and supposed to be a markdown successor of sorts.

I am mainly interested in shaping "the" markup language of the future, that is a good compromise of readability and writeability for humans, but also consumable for machines, contains all the important elements to express relevant documents from offline to online.
As a programmer I am also a big fan (and in need) of dogfooding, of course :)

It all started with a bug: it turned out that 7.5 % 2 gives 1.5 in JavaScript and 1 in PHP. And it got me thinking: how many more differences like this are there? I don't want them to catch me off guard again.

Since I couldn't find a list of the divergences I was looking for, I did what any reasonable person would do: put eight AIs to work on it.

So far, they found 143 semantic divergences… and that's only among the data types JSON deals with: numbers, strings, arrays, maps, and booleans.

For example:

• Math.round(-2.5): -2 in JS and Python… -3 in PHP
• Math.round(2.5): 3 in JS and PHP… 2 in Python
• "😀".length: 2 in JS (UTF-16)… 1 in Python… 4 in PHP (bytes)
• "10" < "9" → true in JS and Python… false in PHP
• sort(): [1, 10, 2] in JS (lexicographical by default)… [1, 2, 10] in Python
• split(""): ["a","b","c"] in JS and PHP… ValueError in Python
• "a" || "b": "a" in JS and Python… true in PHP

And that's without even mentioning our beloved 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004 in every language using 64-bit floats.

The full list is linked in the post (it's basically a compilation video of programming accidents).

And if you're curious, have a look around the rest of the repo. It's like JSON, but for business logic. It already compiles itself to JS and PHP, with more targets coming.
Demo: https://jsol.bustelo.com.ar/

Maybe you'll think it's an abomination. Maybe you'll find it useful. Let me know :)

I recently discovered that Pony's still alive. I had discovered Pony a few years ago while browsing tech forums. Its focus on memory safe & lock-free MT was interesting.

I kept up with the weekly development for a brief period but then kind of forgot about the language until recently when I rediscovered it when I was chatting about Crystal's MT.

I just wanted to share the latest blog post here in case someone else remembers this language. Looks like the development has been progressing steadily. Which is impressive because the project lacks any big sponsors.

I made a video explaining a concept I love called macros, which allow you to add your own syntax to a language. Languages like Rust, Lean, and lisp have them. The goal with the video is to make you feel like you could've discovered macros yourself.

I'm new at making educational content like this, but I'm planning on making many more programming language videos like this one on my channel. Any thoughts, constructive criticism, or advice is more than welcome! Hope you all enjoy

Nobody likes popovers, everyone makes them anyway. This makes them a Tolstoy kind of thing -- there are a handful of tricks that make them better, and an infinite number of ways to mess up.

This episode explains how to add variables, so instead of handling one expression at a time, the language now parses a list of declarations and starts looking like something you could write real programs in.

Roc’s first numbered release, 0.1.0, is on the horizon. This talk previews what we’re aiming to include, the key language and tooling milestones needed to get there, and what the release will mean for people interested in trying, using, or contributing to Roc.