← Feed

Posts

• Post #4364665

  RE: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/44456-celebrating-45-years-of-kermit-with-the-first-new-c-kermit-release-in-15-years-and-working-with-a-decades-old-c-codebase The number of times that Kermit saved a project back in the '80s/'90s... When working in the pharma industry in Basel, CH, I met some people who got hired by the then big-three companies there to hook up machines. Their weapons of choice: a soldering iron and the Kermit source code in various esoteric programming langu...

• Post #4360981

  Ways to make yourself impopular in this nook of the fediverse #14: write about LLMs in a way that isn't doomsday-ish. Oh well, here goes nothing. A blog post about my experience using Claude Code almost exclusively for the last month-and-a-bit creating lots of #elixir and #lisp. https://cdegroot.com/programming/2026/08/03/ai.html

• Post #3625825

  Compleminte oet ...?

• Post #3612743

  Not often that hotel instructions actual make me lol.

• Post #3611296

  Groeten uit.... ?

• Post #3488318

  Groet'n uut...?

• Post #3468803

  Grüße aus ...?

• Post #1782167

  https://coalton-lang.github.io/20260424-mine/ - Mine, a new IDE for Lisp and Coalton. Probably this mostly will land in the echo chamber, but this is a great tool for getting people into Common Lisp and Coalton (so spread the word - it's now easy mode to get going! ;-)) #lisp #commonlisp #coalton

• Post #1039945

  @androcat@toot.cat @jasongorman@mastodon.cloud yeah, maybe I mixed wishful thinking and opinionating here. I mean, one can dream...

• Post #1027697

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@knoppix95/116289644448317818 And that's why I'm a happy GrapheneOS user. Even if it meant, for now, having to buy hardware off Google.

• Post #1027695

  I have two woodworking toolsets in my garage. The yellow-brand stuff is awesome to cut up 2x4s and shoot nails through them until you have a shed or a chicken coop or a deck or whatnot. Then, there's carefully honed chisels, vintage planes restored with love, and - a recent addition - some Japanese saws to craft small things with high precision. Nobody would debate that having different sets of tools here is somehow strange. I also have two "software development" minds...

• Post #1001713

  @screwlisp@gamerplus.org Yup. Where people see threats, I see opportunities: this should be the death knell for the likes of Meta, because /unless you know someone personally/ they'll be more and more likely to be an AI. Which is a great and awesome outcome, I think 🙂 I was on the "cipherpunks" mailing list in the '90s. People discussed identity and "nyms" a lot. How did you know who someone was on the Internet? You didn't. And to a large extent, it didn't m...

• Post #749058

  Just renewed my @guix Guix Foundation membership. I forgot how easy it is to transfer money in Europe: type in name and IBAN, you get an immediate verification that they match, press send, money is there (and this was between a Belgian and a French bank account). No fees, no delays, no intermediaries taking their cut, just like things should work in the 21st century. I think that if the Canadian government is serious about growing our economy, step one is to pull the damn banking system out of...

• Post #749057

  I almost forgot. I was really busy but I promised a quick blog post on Elixir testing, so here it is. It's not polished/finished, but I promised a post, not a perfect one ;-) https://cdegroot.com/elixir/2026/03/09/elixir-testing.html - if people have opinions, i'll iterate a bit.

• Post #749056

  The most recognizable thing about AI generated code seems to be its commenting style: there's a dearth of fully-formed sentences and an abundance of "the next line of code is doing X". Now, my take on LLMs generating code is that they generate the mean of all code they encountered. Just as with testing, this commenting style is indicative of just how bad human-generated code seems to be, on average. I won't stand for this reduction of quality, but I'...

• Post #569476

  https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ?si=wB78xV9E7UtFQSjU Brilliant. #enshittification

• Post #569475

  Oh, and congrats everybody in British Columbia for getting rid of one of the sillier modern inventions. I can only hope Ontario will be next but I'm not gonna place any bets on it.

• Post #569474

  It was fun to chat on @screwtape, thanks @kentpitman @screwlisp @ramin_hal9001 for having me. Recording on https://toobnix.org/w/9otb9JbqRUenLUjK72viwf, next week it seems I'm gonna be grilled on my book, berksoft.ca/gol.

• Post #569473

  We started using Claude code at work. In a reasonable way, I must say: let's give it a spin, see what it can do for us, treat it as a tool in the toolbox, not a developer-displacing silver bullet, etc. Anyway, I was working on a ticket, took time to install the CLI, and then asked it to generate a test for some new code I wrote (usually I TDD, sometimes I code my way first to a solution, it depends. No silver bullets, just tools in the toolbox). What happened next made me giggle, bec...

• Post #569472

  Anyway, your homework assignment is to (re)watch @jbrains's "Integrated Tests are a Scam" talk - https://vimeo.com/80533536 (I'm linking to what I think is the original version of the talk on purpose here: this should have been common knowledge for at least this long. But there's newer vids and blog posts if you prefer). Just this - avoiding the integrated test pit - will help you drive your tests (and code) to a point very close to where you can be happ...

• Post #352639

  @screwlisp@gamerplus.org Happy to talk on your podshowcast. In what sense would Dick's foreword reflect Chris' foreword? I haven't read the latter for a while, I do remember it sounding very much like Chris (I had the pleasure to help him out once), but that's all?

• Post #352584

  @NortherlyGoose@c.im I felt it was an introductory chapter, so kept it before Part I where it really didn't fit.

• Post #336187

  Well, today is the day. I'm finally "sorta happy enough to pull the trigger" on publishing the book I've been working on for a very long time. It's a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for "tech-adjacent" and "tech-interested" people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy...