computer things i like

it's a small list

• c

  despite its many Bad Ideas, it still holds up quite well, which is admirable

• forth

  beautiful, despite being very easy to turn into an unreadable mess

• dos

  so minimal it ends up being surprisingly elegant. even though bios sucks

• sqlite

  sql is silly, but i think the fact that a program like sqlite, fairly small, public domain, written in c, has become so ubiquitous is nice

• uxn

  see description of forth above

• utf-8

  there is little reason to use anything else at this point. even with the historical cruft of ascii it manages to be simple and beautiful i've heard that some scripts (cjk and some brahmic scripts?) are more space efficient in utf-16, but apart from that utf-8 is fantastic

• json

  json is an interesting case, because despite being based very directly on javascript it's not an unbearable piece of shit. cool

• plan 9's c library

  nicer than standard libc, i think

• troff

  troff macros are often unreadable and thus unmaintainable, and yet i still really like troff. neatroff and heirloom doctools are nice.

• 9p

  more programs should support 9p. the world would be a better place

• sfeed

  i cannot imagine using anything else for rss at this point