Plurrrr

macOS has a wonderful input mechanism where you press and hold a key on your keyboard to display the accent menu. It's easy to internalize: long press "a" if you want to input "á".

Fifteen years ago, writing Lisp code in Vim was an odd adventure. There were no good plugins for Vim that assisted in structured editing of Lisp s-expressions or allowed interactive programming by embedding a Lisp Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) or a debugger within the editor. The situation is much better now. In the last ten years, we have seen active development of two Vim plugins named Slimv and Vlime. Slimv is over 10 years old now. Vlime is more recent and less than 3 years old right now. Both support interactive programming in Lisp.

I am going to discuss and compare both Slimv and Vlime in this article. I will show how to get started with both plugins and introduce some of their basic features.

In practical computer science hashing is a very important concept. It is used from simple data structures (like hash maps), highly complex data structures (like bloom filters or hyperloglog counters), database indices and sharding, storage and communication integrity, distributed storage, most password authentication and storage mechanisms, digital signatures, other cryptographic constructs based on Merkle trees (including Git or digital ledgers), and possibly many other use-cases I'm not even aware of right now.

However, not every hash algorithm is appropriate in all of these scenarios, and in fact, very few algorithms are usable in more than a couple of situations. Even worse, using the wrong algorithm will lead in the best case scenario to performance problems, but in the worst case scenario to security issues and even financial loss. Thus, knowing which algorithm to pick for which application is crucial.

Therefore I'll try to summarize how I approach the topic of hashing, including use-cases, recommended algorithms, and links to other articles.