Coding

The principle of “Separation of Concerns” ought to be balanced with the principle of “Locality of Behavior”. This principle is derived from a Richard Gabriel’s paper, “Patterns of Software” (emphases mine): Compression is the characteristic of a piece of text that the meaning of any part of it is “larger” than that piece has by itself. This is accomplished by the context being rich and each part of the text drawing on that context—each word draws part of its meaning from its surroundings. ...

We regret to inform you that something happened with NPM…again: On Dec. 29, a package titled “everything” was published to the registry, which is designed to install all other public packages in the registry. This created a registry-wide web of dependencies that effectively disabled the ability to unpublish packages on the site, as packages that other packages are dependent on cannot be unpublished. The incident triggered responses from developers left unable to unpublish their deprecated or experimental packages, as well as criticism from some who viewed the stunt as an abuse of the open-source NPM system. ...

Josh Comeau writes excellently on the mental model shift that enables you to understand CSS better: A few years ago, I had a Eureka! moment with CSS. Up until that moment, I had been learning CSS by focusing on the properties and values we write, things like z-index: 10 or justify-content: center. I figured that if I understood broadly what each property did, I’d have a deep understanding of the language as a whole. ...