machine readable - CybAI news

23 Sep

Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming Language

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscoding, computer science, computers, google, machine readable, programming, software

Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, software engineers—consider themselves “creatives.” Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer upon themselves multihyphenate job titles (“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and crowd their laptops with identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary sophisticates. Consider the references smashed into certain product names: Apache Kafka, ScyllaDB, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.Much of that, I admit, applies to me. The difference is I’m a tad short on talents to hyphenate, and my toy projects—with names like “Nabokov” (I know, I know)—are better off staying on my laptop. I…

Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing

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For someone just getting into this weird craft, BASIC felt positively thaumaturgic. It was spellcasting: You uttered words that brought iron and silicon to life, and made them do things. (As the software engineer Erin Spiceland puts it, coding is “telling rocks what to think.”) If you were, as I was, marinated in Tolkien and other florid high-fantasy novels, there was a deep romance in the idea that everyday language could affect reality. Speak, friend, and enter.BASIC also encouraged tinkering. Unusually for the time, it was an “interpreted” language. With many previous languages, you wrote the code, but before you…

The Eternal Truth of Markdown

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscoding, computers, machine readable, plaintext, programming, software

Markdown became a core part of how I wrote. The simplicity and flexibility meant I would live the dream of write once, run anywhere. It did lead to some ambiguity, though. Gruber would probably say this is by design. His emphasis throughout the Markdown documentation is on the syntax of Markdown, not—say—the resulting HTML. His Perl script does not support HTML class names or IDs, for example, so you can’t add those to the generated HTML. By the logic of the original Markdown script, if you want complete control over the HTML output, then you’d need to write in HTML.This…