• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • Someone suggested I try Supermaven yesterday, it’s got some good benefits over competitors. It has a 300,000 token context length so it can send a very large amount of context for your completions, and it has an extremely fast API response time (usually less than 200ms) so completions appear near-instantly as you’re typing.

    It’s the first “copilot-like” tool I’ve used, and I’ve only been using it for a day, but so far I’m liking it. And I’ve already signed up for the $10/month pro plan.


  • Lol, that reminds me of when I was in Uni, I had a systems development class, they taught in C, all the lectures, tutorials and assessments were done in C. Our final assignment was handed out the week the first Rust v1.0.0 build dropped in 2015. I had been following the hype around the development of Mozilla’s new language, and I was so keen, I asked my professor if I could complete my final assignment using Rust. He said it’s a great idea. Then cut to me furiously trying to learn Rust in just two weeks, so I could even start the assignment, including C interop, implementing functions with c-style interfaces for callbacks, and lots of unsafe blocks for memory manipulation and pointer manipulation. In the end I was just forcing Rust to be C.

    I did work in the end, and I did get an A, mostly because the professor couldn’t understand any of the Rust code.


  • I was using Inconsolata for about 5 years, then switched to Inconsolata-g when that came out, for another 5 years. But it’s a pretty old font and is TrueType and it’s hinting is bad, so doesn’t render well on Linux and it misses out on a lot of new font features.

    In 2019 I went hunting for a new favourite font, and tried out a whole bunch, giving each one a week in my IDE to really get to know it. During that time I realised I had a bunch of basic requirements for a font that some do better than others:

    • Similar characters should be distinct: eg, uppercase O and number 0. Uppercase I, lowercase l, and number 1. It’s weird how many popular coding fonts fail to make these clear.

    • Not too wide, and not too narrow. You’d think monospace fonts are all around the same size horizontally, but a standard 80-column slab of code can vary greatly in screen space width depending on the font, some are much too wide. Consolas is an example that is too wide. I like to have the option to tile three code panes side-by-side on a 1080P screen.

    • Easy to read. For some reason a lot of coding-specific fonts affect my ability to quickly and easily read the code, and some give me a headache.

    I realised that my use of Inconsolata for such a long time in the early stages of my career definitely shaped my preferences. I was looking for something similar to Inconsolata. That was when I discovered Fantasque Sans Mono. It’s a kind of weird looking font, maybe a bit too playful for a serious coding font, but I found I could read and parse code much faster (maybe it helps with mild dyslexia?), each letter is very distinct from every other. It has elements of handwriting, it has elements of a dyslexic font, it has similarities to Inconsolata.

    I’ve been using Fantasque (with Nerdfonts mixins) for 4 years now. Since then there has been a renaissance of code fonts, like Jet Brains Mono, and Fira Code. I like those, they are good fonts, but I keep going back to Fantasque, it feels so comfortable to use.







  • TL;DR

    It is good for writing cross-platform scripts. It’s easier and more powerful than Bash but not as heavy and cumbersome as Python.

    Raku is the new name for Perl 6. They changed the name because there are backward incompatible changes in the new version, and they wanted to try to move away from the negative associations people have with Perl.

    Perl has always been better than Bash at scripting, and Raku added some modern features to take that advantage further.