Just discovered luapower via a random comment on reddit. Whoa.

https://luapower.com/philosophy

<3

One of the hidden gems in luapower is this little bash script called multigit. It.. oh heck, I'll just let you read about it and have your mind blown: https://github.com/capr/mgit

Relevant excerpt:

"NO [SUB-]DIRECTORIES

This may be a hard sell but I stand by it. [Sub-]directories are evil. Not so much because of semantics, but because of the tools we use suck at working with them. No global overview; instead you have to navigate them."

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App runtimes should support modifying apps.

Here's a 2-minute video on how that might look.

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2021-11-14

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Minor epiphany about Lua

a = {11, 12, 13, key=14, 15}

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You knew this was coming. Conway's Game of Life in text mode using Unicode Braille glyphs.

git clone https://github.com/akkartik/teliva
cd teliva
make linux
src/teliva life.teliva

Sources: https://github.com/akkartik/teliva/blob/main/life.teliva

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New project

https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

"An extremely naïve, brutalist attempt at packaging up simple Lua (5.1) apps with all the stuff needed to edit and build them."

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Fun with the kids on a Saturday morning messing around with daddy's new program.

We gave each ring its own color, and we have it set up to move the towers randomly around after every move. Supremely silly.

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Marceau, Fisler and Krishnamurthi, "On novices' interactions with error messages"

https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mfk-mind-lang-novice-inter-error-msg

A rare empirical study that I found extremely useful.

Outside of a univ course, my lessons are slightly different from the paper's:

• Maintain a map of error messages for a project, use this to minimize the vocabulary of error messages.
• Be enigmatic rather than risk misleading.
• Make affordances beyond error messages optional. Color-coding has a cost. Not highlighting may be better.

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I'm tempted to blindly implement https://github.com/JonathanMEdwards/subtext10/blob/master/doc/language.md in Mu without questioning any of its design choices.

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Hackiest possible support for rendering Unicode combining characters using GNU Unifont

This is the equivalent of backing up a typewriter by one character and overlaying a second letter on the same space.

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

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Unicode in Mu's network-less read-only browser

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Before:

After:

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The Mu computer now loads 140KB of Unicode glyphs from its system font

Unicode blocks now supported: latin, greek, cyrillic, armenian, hebrew, arabic, syriac, thaana, n'ko, indian (ISCII), sinhala, thai, lao, tibetan, myanmar, georgian (< U+1100)

Caveats:

• No support for combining characters yet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character) This makes the other languages I know (Hindi, Tamil) well-nigh useless.
• Unifont's glyphs for the non-Latin languages I know turn out to be quite spectacularly ugly.

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