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Where Should Visual Programming Go? There’s a wonderful article by Sebastian Bensusan: “We need visual programming. No, not like that.” (the dot is part of the title ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). In it, Sebastian argues that we shouldn’t try to replace all code with visual programming but instead only add graphics where it makes sense: Most visual programming environments fail to get any usage. Why? They try to rep

Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things Translations: Chinese Japanese Russian This is my claim: we, as a civilization, forgot how to center things. I mean, we know how to do it. It has never been simpler: display: flex; justify-content: center; /* Horizontal centering */ align-items: center; /* Vertical centering */ (don’t ask why you need to remember four words instead of just hori

JavaScript Bloat in 2024 Translations: Korean Russian I was a bit out of touch with modern front-end development. I also remembered articles about web bloat, how the average web page size was approaching several megabytes! So all this time I was living under impression that, for example, if the average web page size is 3 MB, then JavaScript bundle should be around 1 MB. Surely content should still

In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox Translations: Chinese This is a checkbox: It’s square, it has a checkmark inside, and its distinguishing feature is that you can select any number of them at the same time: Different operating systems rendered them differently during their evolution: macOS Sonoma (2023) OS X Mavericks (2013) OS X Leopard (2007) Mac OS 9 (1999) Mac OS 7.5 (1994) Windows 11 (2021)

If you combine this with the Unicode table, you’ll see that English is encoded with 1 byte, Cyrillic, Latin European languages, Hebrew and Arabic need 2, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean, other Asian languages, and Emoji need 3 or 4. A few important points here: First, UTF-8 is byte-compatible with ASCII. The code points 0..127, the former ASCII, are encoded with one byte, and it’s the same exact byt

Zig, Skia, Clojure, Geometry and the Japanese TV Show: ICFP Contest 2021 Every year I participate in ICFP Contest, or ICFPC for short (ICFP stands for International Conference on Functional Programming). This is a team coding challenge that lasts for 72 hours and in which you have to solve a series of very hard tasks by writing (functional) code. Tasks are usually too hard to find a perfect soluti

Font size is useless; let’s fix it Translations: Chinese Japanese Russian What happens when you set "font_size": 32 in your favorite editor? I would’ve told you anyway, but I’m glad that you asked. Let’s try to guess. I am using Sublime Text 4 on macOS: If we measure letters themselves, number 32 is nowhere to be seen: 32 is not the width or height of a letter, neither is it a capital letter heigh

Emoji under the hood Translations: Chinese Russian For the past few weeks, I’ve been implementing emoji support for Skija. I thought it might be fun sharing a few nitty-gritty details of how this “biggest innovation in human communication since the invention of the letter 🅰️” works under the hood. Warning: some emoji might not display as expected on your device. In that case, use this text versio

Skija: Graphics for JVM Translations: Russian Let’s say I want to build high-quality desktop apps. I also want to do it on JVM. Don’t get your hopes up—we are not there yet. But I have a plan. Why JVM? It’s high level enough—performant, yet doesn’t make you overthink every memory allocation. It is cross-platform. It has great languages — Kotlin, Scala and, of course, Clojure. C# would do, too, but

Time to upgrade your monitor Translations: Chinese Russian • Illustration by Julia Litvin I am a programmer. I do not deal with digital painting, photo processing, video editing. I don’t really care for wide gamut or even proper color reproduction. I spend most of my days in a text browser, text editor and text terminal, looking at barely moving letters. So I optimize my setup to showing really, r

Redesigning Github repository page Illustration by Julia Litvin Github design is pretty good: it gets the job done, it’s clean, has consistent visual language, its design is calm and suitable for everyday use. Given all that, there are still many areas that could be improved. Today we’ll take one interface—repository page—and look what UI problems it has and if we can fix them. First problem: nest

You need neither PWA nor AMP to make your website load fast Translations: Russian There has been a trend of new “revolutionary” techniques on the Web that basically let you do stuff possible decades ago. AMP First, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Think about it: web, in general, failed to be fast, so Google invents a parallel web where they simply don’t let you use JavaScript. Oh, and they let you

Software disenchantment Translations: Chinese French Hungarian Italian Korean Portuguese Russian Spanish I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently, our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and IT in general. Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s

My web app died from performance bankruptcy TL;DR Chrome team breaks web to make Chrome perform better. There’s a widely-used piece of DOM API called addEventListener. Almost every web site or web app that does anything dynamic with JS probably depends on this method in some way. Up until 2016 the convention was that you just pass an event type, a callback and an optional “useCapture” boolean flag

Readable Clojure This is how you can make Clojure code more pleasant to work with: Don’t use “use” Use consistent, unique namespace aliases Use long namespace aliases Choose readability over compactness Don’t rely on implicit nil-to-false coercion Avoid higher-order functions Don’t spare names Don’t use first/second/nth to unpack tuples Don’t fall for expanded opts Use * as prefix for references A

The Web After Tomorrow Modern web does a good job of bringing you live, real-time web applications. Or does it? This post looks at what is missing from the current state-of-the-art web architectures, where they should be improved and what tools we have at hand for that. Server not required Traditional web architectures require DB, server and a browser, stitched together with RPC and REST calls: Bu

Unofficial guide to Datomic internals Disclaimer: I do not work for Cognitect and, unfortunately, haven’t seen any source code of Datomic. I just made it through a lot of public talks, docs and google group answers about Datomic. This post is a compilation thereof. Intention is to help others use Datomic more efficiently by understanding what they are doing. Persistence Datomic models all data as