Simon Willison’s Weblog

String length—Rosetta Code (via) Calculating the length of a string is surprisingly difficult once Unicode is involved. Here's a fascinating illustration of how that problem can be attached dozens of different programming languages. From that page: the string "J̲o̲s̲é̲" ("J\x{332}o\x{332}s\x{332}e\x{301}\x{332}") has 4 user-visible graphemes, 9 characters (code points), and 14 bytes when encoded in UTF-8.

# 3:27 pm / programming-languages, strings, unicode

Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure (via) Stephen Wolfram’s 15,000 word epic about his personal approach to productivity, developed over the past thirty years. This is a fascinating document—I found myself thinking “surely there can’t be more information than this” and then spotting that the scrollbar wasn’t even a third done yet. Very hard to summarize: it turns out if you’re the work-from-home CEO of your own privately held 800 person company you can construct some very opinionated habits.

# 9:46 pm / productivity