I haven’t been weeding the balcony this year (June has been cold). So I went out to the balcony for the first time this year and this was what’s out there:
What is that? Grass? It’s a mighty substantial grass.
Is that… some kind of grain? Wheat? Rye? Barley? Am I a farmer for real now?
I should get weeding and wash down the balcony, too, because it’s supposed to get all nice and warm and stuff now.
Beats. Brian Welsh. 2019. ☆☆★★★★
I thought this was going to be the usual rags to rap riches story, but instead it’s an unusual rags to rap riches story. It’s got PTSD and mental illness and stuff.
It turns out that everything needed to get well is some hard truths from an older man.
The acting’s kinda lame. Well, it varies between really really bad (the label boss) and acceptable (the manager).
When the movie focuses on the music career and the kid it’s OK, but the rest is So Much Drama.
This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.
I’m planning on getting back into Emacs development after being mostly absent for a couple of years. One thing that’s long annoyed me when tinkering with the Lisp bits of Emacs is the huge number of compilation warnings. The C parts of Emacs were fixed up at least a decade ago, but this is what compiling the Lisp directory looks like:
For me, this has been a source of having to go slower when coding: I make a change, look at the output from the compilation window, and then do a double take when I see some warning about something I didn’t think I had touched.
And then it turns out to be an old warning about something completely different.
The number of warnings in an Emacs build has been fluctuating, but sort of growing. There were 440 Warning: lines output by the build process, totalling 1800 lines on stderr. That’s kinda a lot to look at when doing a build.
There’s a number of reasons that the Emacs build looks like this, but the most important is perhaps the somewhat unique way the Emacs Lisp code has traditionally been developed: Many of the major modules have been maintained out-of-tree, and often support a huge number of Emacs versions dating back to the 1980s. Not to mention XEmacs.
This leads to there being conditional calls to code that doesn’t exist in modern Emacs, and code that doesn’t use new calling conventions.
The other is that, well, Emacs has a long history, but the Emacs Lisp language is evolving constantly, what with lexical binding and all. What was good code in 1993 now uses outmoded idioms, and these idioms trigger compilation warnings.
The development situation has changed somewhat over the last few years: Now most of the code in the Emacs tree is developed in the Emacs git repository, and the external packages are instead distributed using the Emacs package system. So the half-external/half-internal development isn’t as big an issue any more (although there are still (very) significant packages developed this way, like CC mode).
And XEmacs compatibility isn’t a major issue any more for many people.
So I thought now was the time to roll up my t-shirt sleeves and get stuck in to the code and get organisised.
90% of the warnings took 10% of the time: They were easy syntactic changes to bring code up to date with the new Emacs Lisp standards. The next 9% took 90% of the time. And then the last 1% took another 90% of the time.
So there was a lot of questions asked and some new tests implemented to ensure that the changes didn’t break anything.
And a lot of questions answered by all the smart people on emacs-devel.
But now it’s over! That is, there’s one single Warning: left, and that’s being pondered.
The total output from a “make bootstrap” is down from 5200 lines to 2900 lines (on this machine; it may vary somewhat), which is a 40% reduction. Looking at Emacs compiling now is a calmer experience.
I also added some new progress messaging in parts where a single section takes so long that it looks like it’s crashed or something, so it’s not purely a “get rid of lines” project.
Virtually all of the warnings fixed were valid warnings (i.e., they were about things we’d rather not see in the Emacs Lisp code), but some warnings were false positives. For instance, Emacs has a method to mark functions as obsolete, and then you get a warning if you load that code, which is a nice way of letting users know that something is going to disappear in a few years. (And Emacs has a very conservative removal policy; obsolete functions are kept around for like a decade.)
But functions are sometimes obsoleted in groups, so you may have one obsolete function calling another obsolete function in that group, and that will issue a compilation warning… and it shouldn’t.
So we’ve introduced a new macro
(with-suppressed-warnings ((obsolete an-old-function)) (an-old-function :foo :bar))
to make the byte compiler know that we know about this, and not issue any warnings about that. (And there are similar things about the number of arguments to the functions.)
I had to use the macro about a dozen places, which isn’t a lot, percentage wise.
I hope the somewhat less daunting compilation output will help developers, old and new, to get more stuff done. At least a little bit.
Murder Mystery. Kyle Newacheck. 2019. ☆☆☆☆★★
Oh deer. Adam Sandler. Jennifer Aniston. And the director has a long an undistinguished career in television.
But, you know, Netflix is TV, so…
I assumed that this was going to completely horrendous, but it’s actually not that bad. The concept here is that Aniston and Sandler are working class Americans incongruously dropped into the midst of a bunch of very, very high class Brits in Malaga, and hilarity is supposed to ensue.
It’s kinda unpretentious silliness, really, set in a classic English murder mystery setting.
That said, so many of these scenes don’t really work. It’s like they’re almost there, but then the jokes just aren’t delivered fast enough, so you get an awkward pause where insanity should be. Or perhaps the jokes just aren’t funny enough.
But it’s way, way better than it has any reason to be. It rolls along in a very pleasant way and there’s a bunch of chuckles to be had.
This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.
Elisa & Marcela. Isabel Coixet. 2019. ☆☆☆★★★
Another Spanish Netflix Original? Sure, I’m game.
And it’s in black and white? Great. But… it looks kinda like an odd black and white? It’s looks a bit washed out… as if it was done on colour video and then they just dropped all the colour? I don’t know. But I’m oddly reminded of El abrazo de la serpiente. I mean, the movies couldn’t be more different, but I wonder whether the idea of not using colour while filming in famously scenic South America stems from the same place: i.e., going against cliché.
It’s been savagely panned by the critics, so I’m an optimist: Perhaps this’ll be great?
There’s a lot here I like: The languid pacing, the cameras getting way up into the actors’ faces, the two main actors themselves, the sparing use of music.
But it’s no masterpiece, unfortunately. The other characters are just too schematic and the dialogue doesn’t convince.
The squid thing is odd.
This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.