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What's bad about Julia?
A mega-rant about all the things I find bad about Julia.
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State of the Common Lisp ecosystem, 2020
This is a description of the Common Lisp ecosystem, as of January, 2021, from the perspective of a user and contributor.The purpose of this article is both to give an overview of the ecosystem, and to help drive consolidation in each domain.Each application domain has recommendations for consolidating that part of the…
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“I Could Rewrite Curl”
Collected quotes and snippets from people publicly sneezing off or belittling what curl is, explaining how easy it would be to make a replacement in no time with no effort or generally not being very helpful. These are statements made seriously. For all I know, they were not ironic. If you find others to add ……
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Async Ruby
Async Ruby is a powerful and highly scalable concurrency feature. It's available today, it's production-ready, and it's an awesome addition to Ruby language!
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Why is my Rust build so slow?
I’ve recently come back to an older project of mine (that powers this website), and as I did some maintenance work: upgrade to newer crates, upgrade to a newer rustc, I noticed that my build was ta...
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Go 1.16 will make system calls through Libc on OpenBSD
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…
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From First Principles: Why Scala?
Scala, first appearing in 2004, is neither an old stalwart nor a new player in the programming language market. This post will discuss the unique combination of features that Scala provides and how it compares to other languages on the market, diving beneath the superficial experience to explore the fundamentals of…
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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…
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Julia: Faster than Fortran, cleaner than Numpy
I'm super enthusiastic about Julia after running this comparison of Julia vs Numpy vs Fortran, for performance and code simplicity.
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PHP in 2021
A look back and forward on PHP
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Structural pattern matching in Python 3.10
A critical but informative look at the new structural pattern matching feature in Python 3.10, with real-world code examples.
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The Modern Java Platform – 2021 Edition
Many developers were burned by the overly complex world of Java back in the early 2000s. The Gang of Four patterns and middleware / J2EE / Java EE led to…
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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…
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Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?
Julia 1.0 came out well over 2 years ago. Since then a lot has changed and a lot hasn’t. Julia 1.0 was a commitment to no breaking changes, but that is not to say no new features have been added to the language.
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Zig, Skia, Clojure, Geometry and the Japanese TV Show: ICFP Contest 2021
4-day coding marathon
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Why Learn Prolog in 2021?
?- learn(prolog).
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Haskell: The Bad Parts, part 2 (2020)
The second part of a blog post series on the parts of Haskell we should avoid using.
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Why Rust strings seem hard
Lately I’ve been seeing lots of anecdotes from people trying to get into Rust who get really hung up on strings (&str, String, and their relationship). Beyond Rust’s usual challenges around ownership, there can be an added layer of frustration because strings are so easy in the great majority of languages. You just…
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Updating the Go Memory Model
The current Go language memory model was written in 2009, with minor updates since. It is clear that there are at least a few details that we should add to the current memory model, among them an explicit endorsement of race detectors and a clear statement of how the APIs in sync/atomic synchronize programs.
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Notes from the Meeting on Python GIL Removal Between Python Core and Sam Gross
During the annual Python core development sprint we held a meeting with Sam Gross, the author of nogil, a fork of Python 3.9 that removes the GIL. This is a non-linear summary of the meeting.
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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…
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Teeing, a hidden gem in the Java API
Last week, I described a use-case for a custom Stream Collector. I received a intriguing comment on Twitter: There was a 'Moved Permanently' error fetching URL: 'https://twitter.com/Miguucm/status/1389258245886390292' Hats off to you, Miguel! Your comment revealed a method I didn’t know! So I decided to investigate…