Category: Uncategorized

Been doing some reading about lexers and parsers in PHP.  Some useful resources:

• https://nitschinger.at/Writing-a-simple-lexer-in-PHP/
• https://www.codediesel.com/php/building-a-simple-parser-and-lexer-in-php/
• https://github.com/weltling/parle/blob/master/README.md
• https://jwage.com/posts/2012/09/15/writing-a-parser-in-php-with-the-help-of-doctrine/
• https://vierbergenlars.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/creating-a-parser-in-php/

My fiction book at the moment is Blue Remembered Earth by Alistair Reynolds. I’m enjoying it so far. The characters are a bit flat, but it’s got an interesting mystery in it. One thing I really like is the background world, it’s around mid-22nd century, and Africa, China, and India are the big world powers. It’s not discussed at all in the narrative – but it seems like a very possible future. It’s relatively peaceful and quasi-Utopian, although it’s hinted at that some of that peace seems to come from authoritarian-sounding mass surveillance.

Really interesting to learn that the developer of the ideas of Gross National Product (Kuznets) was also a very vocal critic of it being used as the only measure of a country’s success.

“the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income”.

Reading Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth. Really liking it so far. Challenges the ingrained assumptions of neoclassical economics and very readable too.