A developer argument circulating online contends that Clojure's live REPL environment is well suited to working with AI coding agents. The piece argues that because Clojure allows functions to be redefined in a running process without recompiling or losing state, both humans and AI agents can test and verify generated code far faster than in languages requiring full rebuilds. It also argues that Clojure's declarative, data-centric style maps better to the high-level reasoning that language models struggle with, compared to imperative code which models can already write well.
yogthos.net
· 2026-10-08
A technical explainer breaks down a widely used pattern in which a random 64-bit integer is reduced via the modulo operator to select among a fixed number of choices. It shows mathematically that when the number of choices does not evenly divide the range of the random number generator, some choices end up more likely than others, breaking the assumption of equal probability.
ersc.io
· 2026-10-06
A programmer published a personal essay describing growing unease as the industry moves toward 'vibecoding' and AI-assisted architecture design, away from hands-on, detail-oriented coding. The post traces the author's eight-year journey into low-level programming, cycle counting, and writing machine code by hand, and laments that these skills are becoming less valued. The author frames it explicitly as a personal journal entry rather than industry analysis.
purplesyringa.moe
· 2026-10-06
A new release of Thoreau BASIC, a modernized dialect of the language, introduces built-in commands for file browsing (GETFILES) and interactive list selection (SELECTBOX) with mouse and keyboard support. It also adds STATEWRITE/STATELOAD for checksummed variable checkpointing, CRC32 and TEXTSTATS utilities, and a SYSTEMINFO$ function reporting CPU, AVX2/SSE2 support and build details. The update also includes JIT improvements for floating-point and complex/quaternion/octonion math, plus a RUN fix to avoid stack growth on restart.
thoreaubasic.com
· 2026-10-03
At a Bloomberg conference in Los Angeles, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said global engagement grew just 2% in the company's most recent reporting period, even as revenue kept growing at double-digit rates across every region. He said Netflix is responding by investing about $1 billion, roughly 5% of its $20 billion annual content budget, in live programming such as sports, wrestling, comedy and major cultural events.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-10-02
A developer working with collaborator stonerl on a full-speed Game Boy emulator for the Playdate console has published a set of advanced optimization techniques discovered during that project. The tips cover how the Playdate's CPU and small instruction cache behave, including the finding that compiling with -Os instead of -O3 and shrinking core code to fit within the 4KB (or 16KB on Rev B) instruction cache can dramatically boost speed.
devforum.play.date
· 2026-10-02
A data structures exercise to evaluate arithmetic expressions like 1+1+1 using a binary tree led one developer to build a full evaluator in C. The project expanded to include closures, a garbage collector, a custom memory allocator, a REPL, and a foreign function interface, dubbed graphLang. The author generalized arithmetic operators into a single function-application abstraction rather than separate cases for Add, Sub, Mul, and Div.
hereticpleb.vercel.app
· 2026-09-29
A software commentator examines why Lisp code, with its uniform prefix notation and heavy parenthesization, is widely perceived as harder to read than C-style languages like Python or Java. The piece rejects the common Lisp community explanation that unreadability is purely a matter of unfamiliarity, and instead draws on cognitive science to propose a deeper structural cause tied to parenthesis placement.
paultm.nl
· 2026-09-28
An engineer at Recurse Center tried to solve a 3D-printed physical puzzle where corn-kernel-shaped pieces must slide into a grooved cob without gaps or overlaps. After manually attempting it, they asked Claude to write a solving script, which required some back-and-forth to correct piece shapes via computer vision. Rather than implementing recursive backtracking as expected, Claude's script imported Google's OR-Tools CP-SAT constraint solver library to find a solution.
thill.me
· 2026-09-27
A Fly.io engineer has announced he is leaving the company to join Kurt on a new venture focused on rethinking how operating systems and applications work in the age of AI. The essay argues that AI is dissolving traditional boundaries between programmers and users, allowing anyone to generate custom software with natural language instead of code.
sockpuppet.org
· 2026-09-25
A 2013 article originally published in Programista magazine (issue 4/2013) discusses techniques for writing high-performance C++ code, emphasizing that choosing a native language alone does not guarantee efficiency. The piece outlines why C++ occupies a middle ground between high-level convenience and low-level hardware access, citing manual memory management and lack of a garbage collector as key differentiators from managed languages.
asawicki.info
· 2026-09-25
An educational retrospective on teaching C explains why types like int, short, and long have no fixed bit-width in the language specification. The author recounts how sizeof(int) returned 2 bytes on old 386 machines versus 4 bytes on most modern systems, and recommends students use the stdint.h header for fixed-width types like int8_t and uint16_t when consistent sizes are required.
pikuma.com
· 2026-09-25
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