Weekly Links #86

Welcome, readers. We're having a short newsletter again, and all the news are about programming. Let's start with Jay Barson telling a war story about the perils of assumptions and arbitrary limits. I already shared my opinion in a comment over there, so I won't insist. Speaking of opinions, John Carmack has one about the best programming language for beginners, and it turns out to be Racket, a Scheme dialect and IDE. And while on the topic of great programmers, Nature magazine of all places has a feature on Ada Augusta Lovelace, who was born exactly 200 years ago (minus four months), and went on to theorize the very notion of a programmable computer, and what programs might look like — including, if I understand correctly, the three fundamental control structures!

Last but not least, not feeling up to tackling a big project, I worked on another toy library this week. VGForm is a very simple JSON-based format for vector graphics, designed to be easily rendered with common graphics APIs such as the HTML5 canvas or AWT's Graphics2D. It's born from my early struggles with using vector graphics in games -- too bad the idea didn't occur to me earlier! But the best course of action is always obvious in retrospect...

On this note, thanks for reading and see you next week.