Vigil

But isn’t a language that deletes code crazy?

No, wanting to keep code that demonstrably has bugs according to its own specifications is crazy. What good could it possibly serve? It is corrupted and must be cleansed from your codebase.

Vigil will do this for you automatically.

Vigil deleted a function. Won’t that cause the functions that call it to fail?

It would seem that those functions appear to be corrupted as well. Run Vigil again and it will take care of that for you. Several invocations may be required to fully excise all bugs from your code.

Vigil – a very safe programming language

#

Battery Movies

What’s the benefit here? I’m not sure I buy the argument that long-form storytelling gives the material room to breathe, or even shows particular fidelity to the writings of Tolkien, Rowling, etc. I fear the real motivation is more cynical than that. It’s the movie equivalent of pumping chickens full of water – bulking out the produce to maximise revenue.

Worst ideas of 2012: the rise of the multi-part movie

#

pulchritude

pulchritude

A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.

— David Foster Wallace, word notes in the Apple dictionary for “Beauty”

#

Let’s start the foodie backlash

Let’s start the foodie backlash

The OED’s very first citation of “foodie” is from 1980, an oozing New York Times magazine celebration of the mistress of a Parisian restaurant and her “devotees, serious foodies”. “Foodie” has now pretty much everywhere replaced “gourmet”, perhaps because the latter more strongly evokes privilege and a snobbish claim to uncommon sensory discrimination – even though those qualities are rampant among the “foodies” themselves. The word “foodie”, it is true, lays claim to a kind of cloying, infantile cuteness which is in a way appropriate to its subject; but one should not allow them the rhetorical claim of harmless innocence implied.

#