A fine song for a rainy Sunday.#

I am soooo glad that sports are coming to the Nintendo Switch. Now I will use mine. I thought they would, of course, have ported Wii Sports to the Switch as the first thing. Kind of like MacWrite and MacPaint. I never bought any other software for my Wii. The fact that I could play tennis in my living room, or golf or go bowling -- that's all I ever wanted. I imagine the new Sports will do a bunch of things the original couldn't, they've had fourteen years to work on it. #

Will I ever stop using Wordle or is this a chronic addiction?#

Ken Smith says Twitter is anti-writer. Hmm. Interesting thought.#

One of these decades the tech industry is going to grow the fuck up and stop insisting on being the boy wonder and respect what has been accomplished before they showed up. Then we won’t have to constantly be retooling and ripping up the pavement and starting over.#

If the Dems had a passion for humanity they’d ratify twenty new Supreme Court justices this year, and pass a law that limits the term of a justice to ten years. I am not a lawyer but I read a book written by one and this is what the author recommends. #

I'm working on a piece of software built around a single closure. The data type that's at the center of the user experience. When you create it as a closure, it is very easy to tweak it up. Every instance of a closure is a little world unto itself. You have to set up protocols for the outside world to speak to the object. That's good because there can't be any other interactions. When debugging you just have to look there. And when there are no deeply hidden bugs, its deliciously easy to work on. But when you type [feedItem, theFeed] when you really meant {feedItem, theFeed}, and your eyes are imperfect as mine are, and you tend to see what you expect to see in debugging, and miss the little subtle mistakes. Whether you use square or curly brackets makes all the difference in the world. It can turn rich structures into undefined. And all the debugging code in the world doesn't help until you see the square brackets are where there should be curly ones. I think this is a lot like Wordle. The pattern has to be seen by the subconscious. You don't move on until you've solved the problem. But unlike Wordle you get as many tries as it takes. #

BTW, written explanations of closures always read like gobbledygook. Here's what I would say. A closure is an instance of a function, as opposed to a call to a function, but they start life as a call. If when you call the function, it still has work to do, in the form of local functions that run every second or minute, for example, or to respond to messages from the outside, such as a click on an object it created (and is linked into the DOM), or an HTTP request, then all its data sticks around. And it's private to the function, no one else can get at it. That helps you keep the overall program simpler, there are fewer things that can go wrong. Now as I read this I'm not sure I got it, but it's close. I guess the thing is I've never written an interpreter for a language that has closures. In my experience that's when you really understand a piece of machinery, when it stops being magic -- when you've implemented it. #