Phil Hagelberg
Programmer known online as technomancy; author of Leiningen, the Clojure build tool, and a maintainer of the Fennel programming language.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Phil Hagelberg did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsWe shouldn't replace Github with one site at all; we need the strength and resilience that only comes with diversity
↗in which more paths are charted towards code independencetechnomancy.us 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsWhen a company dominates the market, they capture not only their own users but even the imaginations of people actively resisting them.
↗in which more paths are charted towards code independencetechnomancy.us 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsAs the software industry is largely driven by trends and fashion, React's "cool factor" led to a mass amnesia regarding how to make normal, well-designed web apps made of HTML with a sprinkling of scripting on top and everything became one big tangled, brittle mass of Javascript that completely keeled over when scripting wasn't available.
↗in which more paths are charted towards code independencetechnomancy.us 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 13 months earlier
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Their wordsInstalling via apt-get instead of luarocks will tend to get you more stable results.
↗in which web pages are served but also fetchedtechnomancy.us 1st of 2 in this piece
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Our reading
A library that skips certificate verification by default is unsafe and should not be trusted.
Their wordsHowever, luasec does not perform any certificate verification by default! This makes its out-of-the-box behavior very unsafe, and I have to recommend against using it for anything.
↗in which web pages are served but also fetchedtechnomancy.us 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 7 months earlier
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Their wordsIf running a server is hard, fewer people are going to do it, and the power is going to be concentrated in the hands of a technical elite.
↗in which social media can be put in your own handstechnomancy.us 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordswhen you send someone a link to a post, they can't read it without loading the entire Mastodon frontend app into their browser, which will is a monster React codebase that will break if they have scripting disabled and also can take up to 30 seconds on older hardware.
↗in which social media can be put in your own handstechnomancy.us 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 8 months earlier
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Our reading
Metaprogramming in a language creates fundamental obstacles to static analysis of its code.
Their wordsLanguages with metaprogramming tend to put up fundamental hurdles to static analysis
↗in which an escape route is discoveredtechnomancy.us 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsmost macros don't actually do anything other than pure transformation of their arguments. It's almost always safe to run them during static analysis, except you don't know for sure
↗in which an escape route is discoveredtechnomancy.us 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIn a subtle but very real sense, every Lua function is an anonymous function.
↗in which an escape route is discoveredtechnomancy.us 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 13 months earlier
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Their wordsthe real goal was to make their users more legible, primarily for advertising purposes, but also to law enforcement and other authorities.
↗in which legibility comes at a pricetechnomancy.us 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsask any member of a marginalized group and they'll tell you that being easy to find can have a high cost when it exposes you to targeted abuse.
↗in which legibility comes at a pricetechnomancy.us 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
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Their wordsIn my opinion the root cause of this bug is that when a white american developer sees a terminal they immediately interpret it as this idealized cartesian plane where they can lay out any writing they want in neatly-spaced characters that behave in "predictable" ways (in other words, behave exactly like English).
↗in which the word column has several meanings, none of them architecturaltechnomancy.us 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsProgramming, of course, is forgetting, but we need to at least try to be aware of the costs of the abstractions we choose and consider who it is that ends up being forgotten.
↗in which the word column has several meanings, none of them architecturaltechnomancy.us 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 5 months earlier
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Our reading
Relying on metatables for method lookup tends to produce surprising, unpredictable behavior.
Their wordsThis is a common problem with using metatables; they can lead to surprising, unpredictable behavior.
↗in which five different paths lead to methodstechnomancy.us 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsBut I do want to stress that each of these five approaches are all just trade-offs, and none of them are universally wrong.
↗in which five different paths lead to methodstechnomancy.us 2nd of 2 in this piece