Quicker

A charming series of videos that visualize various simple sorting algorithms via Eastern European folk dance. Perhaps the Székely folk dance shellsort is the most lively, as well as the optimal algorithm. But using 4-1/2 minutes to sort 10 elements is still somewhat poky.

ᔥ kottke.org

Tiling, literally

Ramsey Nasser explains his Arabic programming language/artwork قلب, a recursive acronym which we could transliterate as 'ALB.

At every single step of the way, every software tool you would use to build a language breaks horribly when encountering non-Latin text. They all expect text encoded as ASCII, which is the standard that includes lowercase and capital Latin characters, numbers, punctuation, and that’s about it. Anything else needs considerably more effort to support consistently. The preceding screenshot shows a version of my interpreter choking on Arabic text and vomiting it out as percent-delimited code points.

ᔥ LanguageHat