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bmn_on Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective (2005)

Source filters are bad because you get a string and parse it yourself and then get it wrong for edge cases. What if Perl already parsed a piece of source for you and handed you a data structure instead? That fixes the greatest shortcoming.

Solution 1: B::Deparse <http://yapceurope.lv/ye2011/talk/3597>, <http://act.yapc.eu/gpw2014/talk/5266> Solution 2: B::CallChecker / <http://perldoc.perl.org/perlapi.html#cv_set_call_checker>

In other words, you do have access to the parser. It's not as neat as in Lisp because of the lack of uniform syntax, but still allows for powerful program transformations: <http://p3rl.org/Kavorka::Manual::Signatures>

bmn_on Give me back my sanity: How I had to install Pandoc in a CentOS Docker container

This. The dumbass in the article doesn't know about packaging and made his life needlessly difficult.

bmn_on Twitter Emoji for Everyone

http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/

Symbola font distribution terms: "In lieu of a licence - Fonts in this site are offered free for any use; they may be installed, embedded, opened, edited, modified, regenerated, posted, packaged and redistributed."

bmn_on Hints for writing Unix tools

I think dwheeler is trying to get this fixed/standardised in POSIX via the Open group.

bmn_on How to explain zero-knowledge protocols to your children (1998) [pdf]

I love this. It could be one of the stories the [Young Lady's Illustrated Primer might tell Princess Nell](http://enwp.org/The_Diamond_Age) when she ventures forth from Castle Turing.

bmn_on TTY: Ruby gem for building command line apps

There's stuff in TTY that does not belong in core (table rendering, logging), and there is a great lack of features that is available by default in [MooseX-App](http://p3rl.org/MooseX::App): bash completion, typo detection/suggestions, command words (à la `git foo`, `svn foo`).

TTY's choice of eliminating dependencies is short-sighted. By embracing dependencies, a library can be more powerful, have more features, solve more problems.