"Just" is used in chess commentary frequently and usually a bit too flippantly as the speaker hasn't gone through all the necessary calculations as the players have to. Sam Shankland mentions this. https://youtu.be/GbFgmXqVLl8?t=1069; https://streamable.com/yuglrw
I haven't used this for large deployments but I use it for my personal server and it works perfectly. Almost everything is built in and I can easily write my own custom operations when I need them. Documentation is good and the operations are well designed.
Only downside is I couldn't make it work with my SSH agent, but that might be a problem with Paramiko and not Pyinfra.
Having played around with Clojure and Scheme for a while (but never got too serious), I always thought homoiconicity and macros were extremely cool concepts, but I never actually ran into a need for them in my everyday work.
>Now, if we agree that the ability to manipulate source code is important to us, what kind of languages are most conducive for supporting it?
This is useful for compiler programmers, or maybe also those writing source code analyzers/optimizers, but is that it? On occasion I have had to write DSLs for the user input, but in these cases the (non-programmer) users didn't want to write Lisp so I used something like Haskell's parsec to parse the data.
The remote code example given in the post is compelling, but again seems a bit niche. I don't doubt that it's sometimes useful but is it reason enough to choose the language? Are there examples of real-life (non-compilers-related) Lisp programs that show the power of homoiconicity?
Same goes with the concept of "being a guest" in the programming language. I have never wanted to change "constant" to "c". Probably I'm not imaginative enough, but this has never really been an issue for me. Perhaps it secretly has though, and some of my problems have been "being a guest" in disguise.
I think both the idea and execution are great. These games would be useful even just as problem statements. I like that each problem clearly defines the desired tone and goals, and that the sample solutions have explanations.
Both in technical and creative writing, I agree that the main issue I've seen is unnecessary filler words, needlessly complicated sentences, and a difficulty clearly expressing the point and staying on-topic.
Some ideas
- A copy of the original text with highlighted words above the editor might be nice
- Not sure if the timer is helpful, might cause people to do a poor job for fear of running out of time. Could start without a timer and add it in as users get more practice