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Last Week in Pony

Last Week in Pony - August 23, 2026

Here’s how it is. Back in 2017, we put in a style guide for Pony and without thinking about it, we accidentally encoded a serious footgun into it. Ooops. Shit. It wasn’t noticed until this week when I was working on using pony-lint on the standard library. The style guide’s operator continuation convention (binary operators at start of continuation lines) interacted badly with the parser. Pony has no ; or anything of the sort to end an expression, so to make something like returning a negative number work, the parser treats any - at the beginning of a line as negation, not subtraction. That silently broke Timer.abs for nine years. The convention is reversed and the linter now catches it.

So, what’s the issue? Pony’s syntax is a little clever. The style guide said put binary operators at the start of continuation lines. And oops, ya, that put you right into “incorrect.”

Odds are, this isn’t an issue for you. In all the ponylang organization code, I found exactly one instance of this as a problem. But it is still a footgun that was lurking. The style guide has been changed. No longer will it be:

a
+ b

for operator continuation. It will now be:

a +
b

because that avoids the footgun. If you are using pony-lint, know that you will get a bunch of new errors because the rule was flipped around. And hey, it’s just another data point in my campaign for “explicit is better than implicit” and my righteous campaign to make everyone realize that “clever” should be an insult.

And in the meantime, while you are reading about the mass of releases that happened this week, listen to the fairly apropos Effity Eff. Read quick though, it’s a damn short song.

Last Week in Pony - August 16, 2026

Here’s how it was. Years ago, I auditioned to be the guitar player in the Heroine Sheiks. Aside from having quite possibly the best name in the history of all bands, they also had an incredible drummer who I really wanted to play with. It took a bit of chutzpah to audition because the guitar player being replaced was a NYC legend. Norman Westberg played some seriously weird and twisted and totally awesome guitar parts for the Swans and later the Heroine Sheiks.

As anyone who knows me can attest, I have chutzpah and was all over that audition. I didn’t get the job. According to John, I was the runner up and “made a hell of an impression.” Turns out I didn’t mind not getting the gig because John left a few months later. I continued to listen to the Heroine Sheiks for years. Great band. So this week, while you’re learning a bit about what’s going on with Pony, enjoy some Heroine Sheiks goodness with Norman on guitar: Mas Suicide. And maybe think about how I’m just a chutzpah machine, ready to step in for Norman and years later, stepping in for Sylvan. And now, on with the show!

Last Week in Pony - July 12, 2026

This week’s theme song is Van Morrison’s “Caravan”. It’s a banger. Turn it up. That’s enough. So you know it’s got soul. Does it tie in with anything in this issue of Last Week in Pony? I could probably invent something, but really, I just love to drop something I’ve been enjoying lately in here every week because why not? If I’m going to write all this stuff up every week, I deserve a few indulgences.

Last Week in Pony - July 5, 2026

This week’s theme song is Player’s “Baby Come Back”. People ask me sometimes how many people use Pony, whether it’s used in production. The honest answer to both is that I have no idea. We’ve never had much visibility into who’s out there. Every so often a hint comes through that someone is shipping Pony for real, and then it goes quiet again.

Last Week in Pony - June 14, 2026

This week’s theme song is The Rubberbandits’ “Horse Outside”, and it’s completely brilliant. It’s a man at a wedding telling everyone to keep their cars. Fuck your Honda Civic, he’s got a horse outside. Pony spent the week in that exact mood. Fuck your external linker, it’s gone. Fuck your second build system, ponyc compiles your C shims itself now. That last one came together so fast it just felt good. Pony is the fucking horse outside.