Luke Plant's home page

In case it’s not obvious from the title, this is mostly just a rant. For the longest time, I was a Mercurial holdout and used it for every personal project where the choice didn’t affect other people. After a long time, I finally switched when: git had won (GitHub etc.) and, Magit gave me a decent interface, better than the Mercurial CLI. But it is still awful. We can forget. I consult for a team of developers, and it involves people who are not software developers by trade who are learning to…

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in it simplest form, is the idea that the language you speak influences the thoughts you think. This post is about a twist on this idea, that I’m calling “Inverse Sapir-Whorf” (for want of a better term), and how we see it in computer programming languages. Sapir-Whorf is one of those ideas that has been popularised in general culture in a rather misrepresented and exaggerated form. In the field of linguistics, not many people today take seriously the “strong” forms…

To scratch a personal itch, I created a small, easily browse-able database of NT/OT quotations – that is, places where the New Testament quotes the Old Testament. I pulled this together from existing sources I found online, just adding some usability: Source code and database in SQLite and other forms - see the GitHub page A simple web interface with filters and hyperlinked verses that bring up the text in the NET version in a popover, with links to the full context in netbible.org. For similar…

Some perspectives on approaching a rewrite of a software project.