The other night, I learned about Thelen’s Device. Apparently, invented in 2002, eight years after Perl 5 was first released, someone typed in the correct sequence of characters to make interesting things happen that Larry Wall never dreamed of.

I’m going to try something new. I’m transcribing (from memory) a review by Jiang MingJiu 7P of one of my games. I visit his game review sessions semi-regularly, and learn quite a lot. Hopefully, writting it down will help the points stick.

Science fiction is an exploration potential realities besides our own, fantastic enough to draw interest, but grounded enough to be relatable. Great writers use this as a tool to reflect upon humanity and expose our own flaws or to praise our own triumphs. These are stories to me best displays these qualities.

For some time now, I’ve seen an interesting trend in some developer circles that have started to expound the amazing attributes of regular expressions. As if these were magical creatures, once harnessed, can solve all of your validation/log processing/grep woes. We see this is the new-fangled regex “checkers”, “explainers”, and “creators”. This is probably a good thing for our community in terms of democratizing a tool that people can use without understanding DFAs, minimization techniques, backtracking performance, etc.; stuff you used to learn for a 4-year degree.

Once upon a time, I hated poetry. That was back in elementary and high school when they presented children with rhymey phrases and expected their still developing minds to glean metaphors and Christ-like allegories from seemingly random spatter of words.