Emacs blogging, ViewPattern argument transform, and named pipes
In case you didn't know, org-babel is amazing. How do we avoid naming intermediary values in code, which we don't care about? And what happens when we open a named pipe for writing?
You have arrived at the mid-week hump. Have a $container of $beverage and enjoy some reading before you speed along with the rest of your life.
New articles
Why I Keep Blogging With Emacs
I envy people who use simple, tailored, static site generators. I wish I could too, but I really, really like org-babel – which I get from publishing through the built-in Org functionality in Emacs.
Full article (1–3 minute read): Why I Keep Blogging With Emacs
Non-Obvious Haskell Idiom: ViewPattern Argument Transform
In our code, we should avoid naming values which we don't care about. That can be difficult when we get a value as an argument but really care about a transformed version of that variable. The ViewPattern
extension comes to our rescue, by letting us transform an argument before naming it!
Full article (2-3 minute read): Non-Obvious Haskell Idiom: ViewPattern Argument Transform
Flashcard of the week
Opening a named pipe for writing is a blocking system call. Why is that?
I suppose this is a bit of Unix arcana, although I learned it in the context of Perl.
It won't succeed until the reader has opened their end of the same pipe.
(Related, writing when the reader has closed their end is a SIGPIPE, whereas reading when the writer has closed their end is a mere EOF.)
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