Piatti del giorno 54

“Okay. That means that our whole solar system could be, like one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being… This is too much! That means one tiny atom in my fingernail could be–”.

• Media for Thinking the Unthinkable - Always cause for celebration when a new Bret Victor presentation goes up.
• Leveling Up - How Cocoa superhuman Mark Dalrymple got that way.
• Fixed Feature - An interesting risk-sharing compromise between time & materials and fixed fee (via The Ruby Freelancers Show).
• Growing a Language - I won’t spoil the very clever rhetorical device (it’s about 8 minutes in). Suffice it to say Guy Steele brings home the molasses feel of expressing oneself in “small languages” about as well as could ever be done, while simultaneously communicating about deep design issues. Serious intellectual acrobatics. (Yes, a repost. But it’s that good).
• A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection - By hating on garbage collection, you’re also hating on reference counting, and vice-versa. Shape up (h/t Colin Barrett).
• State Preservation and Restoration - Also, you really should floss (only the teeth you want to keep, of course).
• Concurrent Debug, Beta and App Store Builds - Nice set of notes on how to allow several builds of the same app to coexist on the same device.
• A closer look at zoom - Kudos to the FiftyThree team for doing zoom thoughtfully, and giving us a similarly thoughful writeup. A similar non-context-breaking loupe is in Vectorworks and I’m surprised how much I’ve come to love it. (Also, FiftyThree’s narrator said “expansion joint.” Architect-who-also-codes fist bump, man).
• Ma (negative space) - I have to take back some earlier ignorant snarking about “nothing” being a much bigger thing in CS than in other fields. And yes, not having a single word for the “nothing something” (or is it the “something nothing?”) in our culture is a tragic oversight, probably holding us back in important but unimaginable ways like zero held back the Greeks.