







There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML. Mention it in most circles and you will receive knowing smiles, dismissive waves, the sort of patronizing acknowledgment reserved for technologies deemed passé. "Oh, XML," they say, as if the very syllables carry the weight of obsolescence. "We use JSON now. Much cleaner."
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
Gemma 4: Byte for byte, the most capable open models
Gemma 4: our most intelligent open models to date, purpose-built for advanced reasoning and agentic workflows.

Resugaring | Proceedings of the 35th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
Syntactic sugar plays a crucial role in engineering programming languages. It offers convenient syntax and higher-level of abstractions, as witnessed by its pervasive use in both general-purpose and domain-specific contexts. Unfortunately, the ...

Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies
On coding agents, malleable software, and the future of interface invention

Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies
On coding agents, malleable software, and the future of interface invention

Semantic computing with IEML - Pierre Lévy, 2023
This paper presents IEML, Information Economy MetaLanguage, a constructed language with the same expressive power as a natural language and with computable sema...

IEML: The Information Economy MetaLanguage
IEML is an acronym for Information Economy MetaLanguage. IEML is intended to become a standard for expressing semantic metadata and for modelling complex human systems. Here is the definitive scien…

The community-first software era
Some ideas about how to encode our values into the tools we use

jax-js: an ML library for the web
JAX in pure JavaScript, as a flexible machine learning library and compiler.

Files As Metadata Format
File structures with simple contents can be used instead of YAML, TOML or JSON. More effectively!
Essential XP: Card, Conversation, Confirmation
This is RonJeffries.com, the combination of new articles, XProgramming, SameElephant, and perhaps even some new items never before contemplated. <br/>Copyright © 1998-forever Ronald E Jeffries
Its Time for a New Programming Language
Today, when compared to any other point in programming history, we find ourselves spoiled for choice when it comes to programming…

The Case for Software Craftsmanship in the Era of Vibes
From the Zed Blog: Working toward genuine, quality software in an era where code production is not the constraint anymore.

The Next 7000 Programming Languages
Landin’s seminal paper “The next 700 programming languages” considered programming languages prior to 1966 and speculated on the next 700. Half-a-century on, we cast programming languages in a Darwinian ‘tree of life’ and explore languages, their features (genes) and language evolution from the viewpoint of ‘survival of the fittest’.

There are a lot of architectural bits, but if I had to pick one design feature it's Lexicons. Lexicons allow for new shared data types and structures in a way that are immediately available on network for any other service provider to adopt. Getting shared agreement in ActivityPub is hard.
Pedro Vezza
Why did you decide to bet on atproto over Mastodon or similar?