I've been thinking about the feasibility of defining a language spec that can both be compiled and interpreted lately. I first thought about it while writing code in crystal, which, for the unfamiliar, is a compiled language based heavily off the syntax of an interpreted language (ruby).

Here are a couple reasons I find the idea interesting:

• It effectively neuters the interpreted/compiled language debates. Why just choose one, when both have such big upsides?
• You could develop a program in the interpreter with the same playfulness as you get in a shell, and then compile it into a speedy 'lil thing!
• It would be wonderful for metaprogramming! From my experience, languages usually define a little janked together syntax for compile-time execution. If the language had an interpreter for itself within the compiler, you could metaprogram and program in the exact same language.

I'm curious if any languages like this exist, or if you can think of more benefits.

Edit:
I just want to mention that my reference to 'feasibility' earlier is not born of disbelief - you can write a compiler or interpreter for any (to the best of my knowledge!) well defined formal grammar with enough effort. I suppose I left that word there to account for the fact that I might have unknown unknowns here.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

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Post Your Update

• How did your week go?
• What books did you get through?
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(Optional!) Focuses for Week 3

• Books with an aggregate review score of less than 4.0/80% on Goodreads, LibraryThing, or any other review aggregator
• Books that someone else recommended to you
• Non-fiction books

Let's burn through these backlogs!

This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

My mother is 65+ years old and loves everything Apple, but whenever I need to touch her computer I find myself questioning that choice.

The degree to which Apple abstract things from the user enables the most absurd behaviors. macOS gives little indication about which programs are open, and the red x on the top left corner just closes windows, not apps. Because the session persistence is so robust, the consequence is that my mother's Macbook Air keeps 12+ programs and their states open at all times literally for months. Every time she comes over from another continent, I close a bunch of stuff and get her an instant performance boost. Plus, she's never really sure if a program is open or not.

The concept of (work)Spaces, as well as the launchpad, spotlight, or even how Finder really works is beyond her. Because of her over-reliance on the dock, she never enabled autohiding, so her screen real state is always crowded.

Folders are entirely immaterial for her. Everything goes to "Downloads" with no organization whatsoever, and she's always looking for stuff "manually" by reading the filenames.

Her machine is running Mojave, and right now I can only see that finder displays two "Libraries": Documents and Downloads. Linux and Windows have Videos, Downloads, Music, etc. Those are easy to make sense of. What's the supposed Mac alternative? Buy stuff on iTunes. Well, if something is not on Amazon Video or Netflix my mother is a pirate like me (hehe), so she never made sense of it and I truly despise using iTunes for doing anything at all. She also downloads a bunch of media related to her job.

I'm not saying macOS is bad, I'm just asking: is it really the best choice for non-technical older people?