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We're going to speed up some numpy code by 100x using "unsafe Python." Which is not quite the same as unsafe Rust, but it's a bit similar, and I'm not sure what else to call it... you'll see. It's not something you'd use in most Python code, but it's handy on occasion, and I think it shows "the nature of Python” from…
I've just read " The Low Quality of Scientific Code ", which claims that code written by scientists comes out worse than it would if "software engineers" were involved.
This is inspired by Dan Luu's post on the advantages of a single big repository over many small ones. That post is fairly old, and I confess that I'm hardly up to date on the state of tooling, both for managing multiple repos and for dealing with one big one. But I'm going to make an argument which I think mostly…
This is a (very late) reply to Patrick McKenzie's " Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice ". I find much of his advice very sensible, and it might be very helpful to someone in the beginning of their career – assuming they can act upon it (and I really don't know whether my 20-year-old self could…
My previous entry has the amazingly interesting title "Blogging is hard". Gee, what a wuss, says the occasional passer-by. Gotta fix my image, fast. Think, think, think! OK, here's what I'm going to tell you: low-level programming is easy. Compared to higher-level programming, that is. I'm serious.
In this piece, I disagree with Joe Armstrong and Rob Pike, basing my argument on the differences between vending machines and gift boxes (illustrated with drawings carefully prepared in Microsoft Paint).
We discuss how to make sure that your access to TLS (thread-local storage) is fast, and how the presence of constructors and shared libraries affects the access time.
I thought about this one for a couple of years, then wrote it up, and left it untouched for another couple of years.
Here's a Forth program debugged in KDevelop – a graphical debugger without Forth support:
Have you ever opened a core dump with gdb, tried to print a C++ std::vector element, and got the following?
I think that all other considerations are of the extrinsic real-world kind – domain modeling, usability, schedules, platforms, etc. I also think that I can show how any "good" programming practice is mainly aimed at minimizing redundancy, dependencies, or both. I even think that you can tell a "good" programmer from a…
Let's assume Go has one killer feature – cheap concurrency – not present in any other language with similar serial performance (ruling out say Erlang). And let's agree that it gives Go its perfect niche – and we're only discussing uses of Go outside that niche from now on. So we won't come back to concurrency till the…
So the other day I both defined Tcl procedures all by myself and used them interactively, and I liked it, to the point where it felt like some kind of local optimum. This entry is an attempt to cope with the trauma of liking Tcl, by means of rationalizing it. I'll first tell the story of my fascinating adventures, and…
isocpp.org announced "the C++ FAQ" to which reportedly Bjarne Stroustrup and Marshall Cline will link to help boost its search rank. Good stuff; also, given that the language is >30 years old – it's about time.