Welcome back! This Weekliest Links is a doozy, including some things we read over break. Get yourself a cistern of coffee and cozy up to a blazing fire if you’re getting the same chill we are in NYC and check ’em out:
“[Haskell] is the most advanced of the obsolete languages,” starts Gerald Sussman in We Really Don’t Know How To Compute. And then he promptly shames the expressiveness of our tools as compared to biology.
Sometimes “boring” can be a strength. The Boring Front-End Developer specifically targets the Frontend but its concepts can be applied to a much wider audience. As Chartbeat continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to find the correct balance between “cool” and “boring” when it comes to our engineering practices.
Medium’s CSS is actually pretty f***ing good. @fat tells a good story about medium’s evolution of how they write css. Oh, and while he was evolving it he created a new font.
Researchers are now taking leaps towards building an robotic chemist. Using a combination of software, robotics, and lots of data teams are trying to solve some fundamental questions about how to build a chemical brain.
