I really like the looks of sqlite-query, and hope it makes it to melpa soon. Being able to so easily spin off CSV results from sqlite queries will come in handy.

Curious about how sniem compares to other approaches to modal editing. I’ve been happy with god-mode for years, but exploring variations to modal editing is always a good thing in my book if it can encourage others to give it a try.

Agree with many of the other comments here saying that they’d be very wary of such a project based on what these choices say about the project’s maintainers. Something else is that while I have real affection for email and particularly IRC based on past experience, I don’t think these two are without problems. Email is so asynchronous that many folks feel obligated to treat writing messages to a list more formally. This is not totally misguided since everyone subscribed gets this message delivered to them. IRC, on the other hand, is so synchronous that you should reasonably worry if anyone will be there to talk with, and about whether or not there are searchable archives.

Something (like GitHub) that can be quick but is also perfectly serviceable for asynchronous communication really does have advantages, imho.

It really is interesting how async Rust takes the shine off of Rust to such an extent. If good old stack based, single threaded Rust wasn’t so polished, I don’t think the async parts would stand out so much. Something that might help is to have some sort of benchmark showing that Arcing through an async problem is still faster than typical GCed languages.

The speed and smoothness are amazing! Missing swipe to vote and better link handling.

It’d be great if more emacs discussion moved from Reddit to the fediverse, as those discussions are my favorite way to get a sense of what I should dig more into. While I hope we’ll see Sacha’s weekly news posts linking to threads here on the threadiverse in the future, perhaps a start would be to create a space for folks to chat about the news items themselves. So, have at it!

I went with ggplot2 some time ago, despite not using or knowing R at all. What pushed me in that direction was that I was using other plotting libraries (I don’t recall which at the time), and there was some aspect of spacing between elements or some such that was making a particular plot look ever so slightly ugly in my eyes… and I couldn’t fix it!

In my frustration, I consciously decided to set aside my version of your “reasonably designed” requirement (I find R consistently frustrating in this regard, though I know some people do all their programming in it and I salute them). I gave ggplot2 a try with a cargo culting approach: search for how to make the kind of plot you want to make, and just tweak that template. I was blown away. I could find recipes for everything I wanted to do, the results were instantly more attractive than what I had before, and I could tweak everything.

matplotlib is absolutely a reasonable option, but even years later I still have R environments attached to most projects specifically for data visualization, and still produce plots that are delightfully aesthetic. So here’s one voice to say that ggplot2 has real merit, especially if your aim is specifically to produce visualizations rather than explore a programming ecosystem.

I also started my FP journey with untyped languages. Finding Haskell changed my perspective because it answered questions I hadn’t yet been able to clearly articulate to myself.

That said, I do sympathize with the criticism that static types can make some things harder to use. I think it’s because we’re not yet doing everything right, but the reality is that some, say, Python APIs are faster to get going with than comparable things in Haskell.