5971
Let's build a simple interpreter for APL, part 2 (2020)
Today is the day! Today is the day we take our APL programs and interpret them, so that something like ÷ 1 2 3 -⍨ 1.1 2.2 3.3 can output 10 5 3.33333333.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,541 posts.
5972
Commit often, perfect later, publish once: Git best practices (2013)
Best Practices vary from environment to environment, and there is no One True Answer, but still, this represents a consensus from #git and in some cases helps you frame the discussion for the generation of your very own best practices.
5973
Where are we going from here? Software engineering needs formal methods
The job of a software engineer is not to produce code, but to solve problems; we just happen to solve most of those problems by producing code. Ultimately, producing code is hard, and we need help. That's why GitHub's Copilot is exciting, but it's far from ideal, and it's the tip of the iceberg of what's been done and…
5974
The Dawn of Formalized Mathematics
Here are the slides of my talk “The dawn of formalized mathematics” from the 8th European Congress of Mathematics , which is taking place online and in Protorož, Slovenia, from June 20 to 26, 2021:
5975
Things I wish Git had: Commit groups
Everyone 1 and their dog 2 loves Git. I know I do. It works, it’s efficient, it has a brilliant data model, and it sports every feature under the sun . In 13 years of using it, I’ve never found myself needing a feature it didn’t have. Until recently.
5976
In JS functions, the ‘last’ return wins
An edge case has convinced me it's the 'last' return that always wins…
5977
Folk wisdom on visual programming
I’m a fairly frequent Hacker News lurker, especially when I have some other important task that I’m avoiding. I normally head to the Active page (lots of comments, good for procrastinat…
5978
REPL vs CLI: IDE wars
An unfair heavily biased apples-to-oranges comparison… unless?
5979
Don't encode POST bodies like GitHub Copilot, use URLSearchParams
Don't do it like GitHub Copilot!
5980
Lessons from Building a Static Site Generator (2020)
The backstory behind Elder.js and the thinking behind the 5 biggest design decisions.
5981
Book Review: A Philosophy of Software Design (2020)
View this page on my new site This review is largely in response to the article "It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code", and the ensuing Redd...
5982
Data notation in Clojure
Homoiconicity (code as a data structure) is one of the pillars of the Clojure language. It gives the extensibility and flexibility to the language.
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I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)
In defense of one of the most important JavaScript libraries ever
5985
Learn by reading code: Python standard library design decisions explained
On your Python learning journey, you may have heard that a great way to get better is to read code written by other people. That's true, but finding good code to study is not easy, mostly because the design philosophy and the reasoning behind the code are rarely documented. The Python standard library is special in…
5986
Data-oriented design or why you might shoot yourself in the foot with OOP (2009)
Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. In an attempt to improve performance, you try to parallelize parts of the code, but it takes heroic efforts, and, in the…
5987
Problems with math rendering on the web (2020)
Since I first started working on my website at age fourteen, the site has gone through many revisions, and hopefully changed for the better. This blog was originally dynamically served using a Python/Flask backend, having a custom login system and post “editor” (just an input box). One of the more strange things about…
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Typed Programs Don't Leak Data
Mistral Contrastin's thought bubble, blog, and personal revelations.
5989
Let's code a TCP/IP stack (2016)
Writing your own TCP/IP stack may seem like a daunting task. Indeed, TCP has accumulated many specifications over its lifetime of more than thirty years. The core specification, however, is seemingly compact[^tcp-roadmap] - the important parts being TCP header parsing, the state machine, congestion control and…
5990
The free lunch is over: a fundamental turn toward concurrency in software (2005)
The biggest sea change in software development since the OO revolution is knocking at the door, and its name is Concurrency.
5991
When it comes to Git history, less is more
One person's entry-level contribution is another person's difficult bugfix or backport.
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5993
Functors and Monads for People Who Have Read Too Many “Tutorials”
Title is literally true. This may not be the best place to learn about these concepts for the first time, because I'm going to focus on knocking down the misconceptions about them.
5994
Correctly implementing a spinlock in Modern C++
I’ve seen a lot of poorly implemented spinlocks floating around the internet.
5995
Goodbye C++, Hello C
Part 1 of this series about my toy renderer covers the most fundamental design decisions. Over the years, I have written many renderers and for a long time their complexity kept growing. This time, I took the opposite route. I wanted to maximize the fraction of code that implements crucial functionality rather than…
5996
Notes on streaming large API responses
I started a Twitter conversation last week about API endpoints that stream large amounts of data as an alternative to APIs that return 100 results at a time and require …
5997
Hierarchical Structures in PostgreSQL (2020)
Modelling hierarchical/team/categorical/tag data with arbitrary depths.
5998
Go 1.17 is deprecating the traditional use of 'go get'
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
5999
Fun and dystopia with AI-based code generation using GPT-J-6B
At the least, AI-generated code is much more readable than the average human’s.
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Opinion-Driven Design
Some of my personal thoughts on how we design open source projects