Interesting Links From Around the Web

Written by Bastien Guerry (the current maintainer of Org mode).

The best explanation of flexbox online.

A project for comparing the speed of different programming languages by implementing a number of algorithms in multiple programming languages. Tests are automatically re-run every few days.

Built off the Programming Language Benchmark Game. There is no correlation between energy efficiency, run time, and memory usage. Top 5 most energy efficient programming languages are:

1. C
2. Rust
3. C++
4. Ada
5. Java

Very interesting to see how far back many key feature go back in Emacs.

I was especially inspired by the opening paragraph of "Editing Other Things", as this completely articulates why it is valuable to put all these features directly into the Emacs editor.

Interactiveness is useful in many activities aside from editing text. For example, reading and replying to mail from other users ought to be interactive. Many of these activities occasionally involve text editing: for example, editing the text of a reply. If a special editor is implemented for the purpose, it can easily be much more work to write than all the rest of the system. It is easier to write the other interactive system within the framework of an extensible editor.

Transcript of Richard Stallman's Speech, 28 Oct 2002, at the International Lisp Conference.

Interesting to hear about the motivation behind Scheme's choice as the recommended GNU extension language. With the extensibility of GNU Emacs in mind, it would be amazing to have that level of power in more applications.

At the time, TCL was being pushed heavily for this purpose. I had a very low opinion of TCL, basically because it wasn't Lisp. It looks a tiny bit like Lisp, but semantically it isn't, and it's not as clean. Then someone showed me an ad where Sun was trying to hire somebody to work on TCL to make it the “de-facto standard extension language” of the world. And I thought, “We've got to stop that from happening.” So we started to make Scheme the standard extensibility language for GNU. Not Common Lisp, because it was too large. The idea was that we would have a Scheme interpreter designed to be linked into applications in the same way TCL was linked into applications. We would then recommend that as the preferred extensibility package for all GNU programs.