Introducing Awk-ward.nvim
In order to make writing Awk scripts easier I have written a new Neovim plugin: Awk-ward.nvim (GitHub mirror). This plugins allows you to edit an Awk script or its input, and see the output live as you are making changes.
Mirroring a GitLab repository
I use GitLab to host my various projects, but it is always a good idea to be able to have an automatic mirror set up. It adds redundancy in case something goes wrong with GitLab, and having a mirror on a popular site like GitHub allows people to file issues without signing up for a less popular service. I am writing this down for myself so I don’t have to figure out how to set up a mirror every time anew. This was written for GitLab version 12.0.0.
Introducing Guile.vim
Vim has good support for Scheme, but the problem with Scheme is that every implementation adds its own features to the language. My guile.vim plugin aims to improve support for GNU Guile by augmenting these settings. It can attempt to detect when a Scheme file is Guile-specific and it adds syntax highlighting for Guile-specific forms.
Understanding 2D rotation matrices
When I first a^2 + b^2 learned about rotation matrices they appeared quite “magic”; if you squinted your eyes a bit it sort of made sense, and if you did the math you could prove that the matrix does indeed perform the rotation and that all the group properties are met, but none of that explains where that form comes from, why it works. In this blog post I will explore a way to derive the formula for rotation matrices step by step. If you wish to follow along you need only basic knowledge of linear algebra and trigonometry.
What is a programmable programming language?
When I was still researching this fabled obscure language called Lisp one thing people kept saying about it is that “Lisp is a programmable programming language”, but I could never figure out what they meant by that. It sounds like a smug buzzword or like a gimmick from an academic toy language. Lisp programmers have gotten so used to metaprogramming in Lisp that they seem to forget that it is either an entirely alien concept to people, or something people have been burned by too often (like every C programmer).