espalier VS duckduckgo-locales

It’s been several years since I’ve worked in Clojure. When I started to dive into the language, I was warned not to write macros without a good justification (and heeded those warnings).

One of my most memorable projects[1] relied heavily on macros. I knew at the time that I was using the tools I had to automate a performance optimization technique. What I didn’t know at the time was that my former (and once again future) ecosystem, JavaScript (now TypeScript), was going through a tooling revolution (of sorts, no value attached to that observation). Babel, and then countless other tools, were transforming more and more JS. Now that sort of thing is pretty much the default.

All of that is to say: macros are not a silver bullet, they’re not trivial to write/read/maintain… but goodness dealing with similar use cases in JS environments routinely makes me long for them.

The amount of esoteric knowledge required to build something similar to my 150 line library in a JS context is absolutely bonkers. Versus just using built in language features and calling runtime functionality as needed at build time.

I don’t want to overly romanticize either macros generally or Clojure specifically. But I sincerely believe a large part of the frustration with the JS ecosystem from developers’ perspective would be significantly less frustrating if manipulating the language and sharing build/runtime logic were part of the language itself.

1: https://github.com/reup-distribution/espalier

This is quite a wild ride. My only Lisp experience is Clojure, and I have written some macros[1], but never dove anywhere near this deep into everything that’s going on.

It’s interesting, I’ve spent a lot of recent personal interest time deep diving into code transformation in JS/TS. These concerns about name collision and shadowing are front and center there, but of course tree-walking AST transform is the ~only game in town[2] and it’s had me pining for first class language macros.

1: The first that comes to mind https://github.com/reup-distribution/espalier

2: I have some ideas on this, but nowhere near fully formed enough to elaborate just now; suffice to say they derive a lot from what I do know about macros.

No, I think the inspiration is more direct https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lewis+carroll+alice+in+wonderland+...

Yea caught me, I self reported to try and trick everyone. Jokes aside my comment was based on net neutrality if you don’t remember https://duckduckgo.com/?q=net+neitrality+bot+comments

Some of the stuff that really chipped at our privacy as our isps got to sell our dns pings to advertisers and social media. Have a good day citizen.

AI Chat is separate from the search engine. On the search engine we have DuckAssist, which is currently grounded in Wikipedia (more sources coming): https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+the+stoichiometric+ratio+b...

that one is good, but I detest keyboards with their own magic little dongle since it's a damn fine thing to misplace

I'm surprised OP didn't enjoy https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-ergonomic-keyboard... which is currently listed as out of stock but I dunno if that means "permanently" or what, but they seem to be available via 3rd party channels

Its "klacking" aside, pour one out for https://duckduckgo.com/?q=microsoft+natural+elite+keyboard&t... which I loved, although I'll be straight that I love the Surface Ergonomic better because I think its keytravel is much, much nicer and no weirdo + shaped cursor keys, the inverted T like $diety intended

Sculpture can be tactile. I know it's not purely tactile, but thinking of it in that way is becoming a lot more common (eg at the Louvre). And then I went to find a URL for the tactile dome at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (https://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/tactile-dome) and it turns out there are lots of tactile galleries now:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tactile+gallery&t=fpas&ia=web

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ontario+minimum+automobile+insuran...

https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-mto-drivers-handboo...

https://www.ibc.ca/insurance-basics/auto/types-of-auto-cover...

For the US:

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/minimum-require...