Hopefully staying as such. I like Numbers, but I suspect I could totally replace my use of it with Emacs org-mode.

I thought Keynote, Pages, and Numbers were complimentary. Or part of an iCloud subscription or something. Is that changing?

Or not.

I think ed is still a great editor for specific tasks. As a plan 9/9front user, when you get yourself into trouble, it's sometimes the only editor you've got left (like when graphics doesn't initialize, which I've not seen on 9front — ever?)

It's really not bad, and you can use it for scripting like sed, but it's clunkier.

Was that not basically in the same vein as Google's NaCL? Was that not largely abandoned due to the success of WASM.

lol?

I think this thinking makes sense if you've not used enough programming languages pragmatically.

But, if you squint, great API design is a bit like embedded domain specific language design as well.

I think there's room for both.

correct.

Looks neat. Can't use it due to the license.

Why not?

My understanding is that any organizations have an absolute ban on using anything with AGPL because it affects any other code that touches it and its considered too high a risk.

Not exactly how it works but I do understand the concern. The other option is to "just give it away" by not having it and being sherlocked... Now? You have to ask permission first, commercial licensing is a thing.

I start to want a Reader Monad stack for all the stuff I need to thread through all functions.

Yeah, these kinds of "orthogonal" things that you want to set up "on the outside" and then have affect the "inner" code (like allocators, "io" in this case, and maybe also presence/absence of GC, etc.) all seem to cry out for something like Lisp dynamic variables.

A few languages have those, and I don't miss them, because in large codebases it becomes a pain to debug.

xBase, Clipper, Perl, Tcl upvars

It depends on how you do it. XSLT 2.0 had <xsl:tunnel>, where you still had to declare them explicitly as function (well, template) parameters, just with a flag. No explicit control over levels, you just get the most recent one that someone has passed with <xsl:with-param tunnel="yes"> with the matching qualified name.

For something like Zig, it would make sense to go one step further and require them to be declared to be passed, i.e. no "tunneling" through interleaving non-Io functions. But it could still automatically match them e.g. by types, so that any argument of type Io, if marked with some keyword to indicate explicit propagation, would be automatically passed to a call that requires one.

that's basically implicit parameters, the typed, well behaved version of dynamic scoping.

Yep, I believe that's what Scala called that.

And I think we need something like this to get people off globals.

I really don't like Object Oriented programming anywhere. Maybe Smalltalk had it right, but I've not messed with Pharo or anything else enough to get a feel for it.

CLOS seems pretty good, but then again I'm a bit inexperienced. Bring back Dylan!