# Joy & Curiosity #10 *Interesting & joyful things from the previous week* By Thorsten Ball • October 13, 2024 --- Last week we took the kids to a small amusement park. We got there early and when we walked in, employees of the park were still getting the park ready for the day: sweeping, feeding animals, raking leaves, putting new bags in trash cans. And I kept thinking: “this is exactly like in Rollercoaster Tycoon!” So this week, let me remind you: “[Sawyer wrote 99% of the code for](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_(video_game)#Development)*[RollerCoaster Tycoon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_(video_game)#Development)*[in x86 assembly language for the Microsoft Macro Assembler, with the remaining one percent written in C](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_(video_game)#Development).” --- - Patrick and Mariano are organizing [a meetup in Munich called Hombrew Systems Club](https://twitter.com/dubroy/status/1844723902066422242) and it sounds wonderful. I’m going to give a short talk on writing Tucan, the optimizing compiler in Rust that I hacked on for a few years. Filling 10 minutes won’t be an issue, but I’m really worried about creating slides that match the “~~Vibes~~” - [Derek Sivers was on the Andrew Wilkinson podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZOWiXh8mo). Derek’s books have meant a lot to me over the years and listening to him talk like this for an hour created some very enjoyable moments of reflection. Super interesting bit from the episode: the Derek Sivers as I know him — author of books, TED talker, blogger, /now-page haver — only started to exist when he was 38. - [Where did the](https://rodarmor.com/blog/whence-newline/)`\n`[in the Rust compiler come from?](https://rodarmor.com/blog/whence-newline/) Mind-bending, to-the-point, fun blog post. “[perfect blog post](https://x.com/davidcrawshaw/status/1843410305134760018)” indeed. - As a response to my post here, [Glad I did it in Go](https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/glad-i-did-it-in-go), a reader sent me an email to share a document he authored with me: [Argument against Python in Education](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dpKjHGzzmpGe2-34x6fb3fhtEBW25OCwL9UvVEOwrPc/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.ceto79q9te33). I don’t enjoy a lot of discussions around language design because most of them are very abstract and very academic — this document though, it’s refreshing and interesting because it’s grounded in practice, in *reality*. Really enjoyed that, thanks for sharing Patricio! - And as a response to my post this week, [Use data that looks like data](https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/use-data-that-looks-like-data), Sam [shared](https://twitter.com/samwhoo/status/1844061593329451465) this blog post: [Greppability is an underrated code metric](https://morizbuesing.com/blog/greppability-code-metric/). Again: this is as real, as rubber-hits-the-road, as practical as it gets. I love it. I’ve used greppability as a metric in the past and it makes me happy that I now have something to link to. - I’ve thought a lot about the PATH environment variable in the past few months (due to fixing or improving a lot of environment-handling things in Zed — [I wrote a long doc about it here](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/docs/src/environment.md)) and then came across this blog post this week:[Modern PATH environment variable](https://blog.izissise.net/posts/env-path/). “as of the year 2024 that's it”, they write, and present a really short PATH — I’m telling you: if everyone would have a well-managed PATH like this, 50% of the world’s bugs would disappear (not really, but still.) - [Deno 2 was announced this week](https://deno.com/blog/v2.0) and, again, it’s all about practice and tooling. I guess that’s a given, since Deno is a runtime and tooling and not a new language, but it still made me think back to what a friend said last year: “Ruby missed the boat because Matz thinks developer happiness is purely about the language and they missed that it’s more and more about the tooling.” - A Haskell programmer wrote about their “[negative views on Rust](https://chrisdone.com/posts/rust/)”. I agree with some of it (on the Good and the Bad side), but what stuck with me was use of “tamagotchi”: “This aspect of Rust puts me off. I don’t need another [tamagotchi](https://chrisdone.com/posts/tamagotchi-tooling/).” - This whole [discussion around the Deppenapostroph in German](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41787647) was *fascinating — *so many flashbacks to early 2000s internet and people being annoying and annoyed by wrong punctuation on forums and IRC. [Plenking](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenk) was a capital offense just like Deppenapostroph and while I haven’t thought of that term in ten years, I still get shivers when someone puts a space in front of puncutation mark. - Keep thinking about this [Patrick Collison tweet on distraction.](https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1843330133895323792) I only have half-formed thoughts here, but Zed’s Slack is the quietest Slack I’ve ever had in a workplace and over the past year I’ve been thinking a lot about that and which effects it has. - Another good tweet: “[capital structure ripples through management and ultimately ripples through employee experience.](https://x.com/trumav/status/1842588495488983454?s=46)” Nice lens to look through at past experiences working at startups — in Germany, in US, inside large corporation. ---