Knuth recommended getting familiar with the program by picking up one particular part and "navigating" the program to study just that part. (See https://youtu.be/D1jhVMx5lLo?t=4103 at 1:08:25, transcribed a bit at https://shreevatsa.net/tex/program/videos/s04/) He seems to find using the index (at the back of the book, and on each two-page spread in the book) to be a really convenient way of "navigate" the program (and indeed randomly jumping through code, as you said), and he thinks that one of the convenient things about the "web" format is that you can explore it the way you want. This is really strange (to us) as the affordances we're used to from IDEs / code browsers etc are really not there

With every generation of computing comes a dominant new software or hardware stack that sweeps away the competition and catapults a fledgling technology into the mainstream.I call it the Canonical Stack (CS).Think the WinTel dynasty in the 80s and 90s, with Microsoft on 95% of all PCs with “Intel inside.” Think LAMP and MEAN stack. Think Amazon’s S3 becoming a near universal API for storage. Think of Kubernetes and Docker for cloud orchestration.

By offering to have a real-time technical discussion, you are reframing the code review process away from an 'instructor correcting student' dynamic and into a 'colleagues working together' mindset.

Level 5: Stop the line. The highest level of code review comments. Borrowing the term from Toyota's manufacturing process this is when the code reviewer noticed something in the PR that signals a major defect.

Level 4: Infringement. This is where things get more serious, note that infringement means rules were broken. In this context, rules can mean a number of things, from the more obvious feature spec and framework rules to things like style guides and coding principles.

Level 3: Suggestions. These can also be thought of as recommendations and alternatives.

Level 2: Nitpicks. Usually, comments about grammar errors and minor stylistic issues/typos go there. The solution to the nitpicks is usually very obvious and if the solution is opinionated, the opinion is not strongly held. Naming a method foobarGenerator vs foobarFactory goes in here, and nitpick comments often start with Nitpick:.

Level 1: Clarifications. I also think of these as sanity checks, I may even start the comment with something like I may be completely off the base here... or Just to sanity check...

The problem is that a lot of old school website devs can write jQuery and very very little actual JavaScript.

now something breaks elsewhere that was unsuspected and subtle. Maybe it’s an off-by-one problem, or the polarity of a sign seems reversed. Maybe it’s a slight race condition that’s hard to tease out. Nevermind, I can patch over this by changing a <= to a <, or fixing the sign, or adding a lock: I’m still fleshing out the system and getting an idea of the entire structure. Eventually, these little hacks tend to metastasize into a cancer that reaches into every dependent module because the whole reason things even worked was because of the “cheat”; when I go back to excise the hack, I eventually conclude it’s not worth the effort and so the next best option is to burn the whole thing down and rewrite it…but unfortunately, we’re already behind schedule and over budget so the re-write never happens, and the hack lives on.

as if the only option we had to eat was factory-farmed fast food, and we didn’t have any way to make home-cooked meals

If you’re a coder, when’s the last time you just quickly built something to solve a problem for yourself or simply because it was a fun idea?

This column will continue only if I hear from people who use literate-programming systems that they have not designed themselves. and it did not continue.

To keep tiny mistakes from crashing our software or trashing our data, we write more software to do error checking and correction.

suppose when you needed to make a permanent edit to the style sheet on your homepage, you opened up the CSS viewer, made the edit, and the result persists—not just in your browser, but by changing the very style sheet itself

an acknowledgement of network effects: LP is unlikely to ever catch on enough to be the majority, so there needs to be a way for a random programmer using their preferred IDE/editor to edit a "literate" program

in other words, there would be no "weave" step

memory usage and (lack of) parallelism are concerns

local a (e.g. aPoint) param p (e.g. pPoint) member instance m (e.g. mPoint) static s (e.g. sPoint)

This can get much worse than the above example; the number of \’s required is exponential in the nesting depth. Rc fixes this by making the backquote a unary operator whose argument is a command, like this: size=‘{wc -l ‘{ls -t|sed 1q}}

for parsing and converting a superset of Markdown

We overload the meaning of "GFM" to mean "GitLab Flavored Markdown", which is a superset of GitHub's version. However it can cause confusion as they are not the same thing.

The argument used to propose its use is to avoid the construction of multiple volatile objects. This supposed advantage is not real in virtual machines with efficient garbage collection mechanisms.

When creating a singleton, the author is making the assumption that no program will ever have any reason to have more than one instance of the class.  This is a big assumption, and it often proves wrong later on when the requirements change.

Avoid singletons from the start.

Stop using TODO for everything in your comments that requires you to do something later.

Instead read this gems brief source code completely before use OR copy the code straight into your codebase.

I'm not sure what $name is

comparing the event and window.event isn't enough to know if event is a variable in scope in the function or if it's being looked up in the window object

Then, if the string can be represented as ASCII, only one byte of memory is used per character. If the string uses more extended characters, it might end up using as many as 4 bytes per character. We can see how much memory an object needs using sys.getsizeof()

I feel like better code visualization would solve a lot of my problems. Or at least highlight them.

The Code Review Pyramid

Let’s look at a recent paper by Xia, Bao, Lo, Xing, Hassan, & Li entitled Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals and published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 44, 951-976, 2018. This paper is quite interesting in that it describes in great details how the figures are obtained. And it says that Comprehension took on average ~58%.

The SE server is also responsible for building ebooks when they get released or updated. This is done using our ebook production command line toolset.

# Input Input: 123, Output: Input: 121, Output: Input: 111, Output: Input: 123454321, Output: Input 123123, Output: # Instruction Output true if input is a palindrome # Output Input: 123, Output: false Input: 121, Output: true Input: 111, Output: true Input: 123454321, Output: true Input 123123, Output: false

software will work only if we provide the tools to fix it when it goes wrong

Using named arguments is nice for languages that support it, but this is not always a possibility. Even in Python, where time.sleep is defined with a single argument named secs, we can’t call sleep(secs=300) due to implementation reasons. In that case, we can give the value a name instead.Instead of this:time.sleep(300)Do this:sleep_seconds = 300 time.sleep(sleep_seconds)Now the code is unambiguous, and readable without having to consult the documentation.

Core: like an engine in a car. The product is meaningless without it.Necessary: like a car’s spare wheel. It’s rarely used but when needed, its function decides the success of the system.Added value: like a car’s cup-holder. It’s nice to have but the product is perfectly usable without it.Unique Selling Point: the main reason people should buy your product instead of your rivals. For example, your car is the best off-road vehicle.

front-end dumpster fires, where nothing that is over 18 months old, can build, compile or get support anymore. In my day job, I inherit "fun" tasks as 'get this thing someone glued together with webpack4 and frontend-du-jour to work with webpack5 in 2022

Literate programs allow you to answer these questions naturally.

In 1994, The Unix-Haters Handbook was published containing a long list of missives about the software—everything from overly-cryptic command names that were optimized for Teletype machines, to irreversible file deletion, to unintuitive programs with far too many options. Over twenty years later, an overwhelming majority of these complaints are still valid even across the dozens of modern derivatives. Unix had become so widely used that changing its behavior would have challenging implications. For better

Object hierarchies are very different from relational hierarchies. Relational hierarchies focus on data and its relationships, whereas objects manage not only data, but also their identity and the behavior centered around that data.

it doesn't mean that we actually want all the instances in the heap to be reinitialized

The PA group has given the name cliche to commonly used programming constructs.

Understanding a strange codebase is hard.

too many of the coders I know would not honestly attempt it; they are in too much of a hurry to get the code written

C Interview Questions

the guide shall be written in such a way that all we have to do is produce the guide itself and then a computer can do the heavy lifting—where we might otherwise expect a separate, possibly GUI-driven, "app" to be created for the end user to interact with, we accomplish the same effect by making the guide very detailed—in part also an attempt to evoke the style and quality of old equipment operation and repair manuals that used to be available, when such manuals could be expected to include e.g. full schematics. If done correctly, this should be sufficient for the guide itself to be interpretable by a machine.

"Context" manipulation is one of big topic and there are many related terminologies (academic, language/implementation specific, promotion terminologies). In fact, there is confusing. In few minutes I remember the following related words and it is good CS exam to describe each :p Thread (Ruby) Green thread (CS terminology) Native thread (CS terminology) Non-preemptive thread (CS terminology) Preemptive thread (CS terminology) Fiber (Ruby/using resume/yield) Fiber (Ruby/using transfer) Fiber (Win32API) Generator (Python/JavaScript) Generator (Ruby) Continuation (CS terminology/Ruby, Scheme, ...) Partial continuation (CS terminology/ functional lang.) Exception handling (many languages) Coroutine (CS terminology/ALGOL) Semi-coroutine (CS terminology) Process (Unix/Ruby) Process (Erlang/Elixir) setjmp/longjmp (C) makecontext/swapcontext (POSIX) Task (...)

This (somewhat contrived) example allows the inner loop to abandon processing early: callcc {|cont|   for i in 0..4     print "\n#{i}: "     for j in i*5...(i+1)*5       cont.call() if j == 17       printf "%3d", j     end   end }

Make simple changes to (some carefully chosen fork of) any project in an afternoon, no matter how large it is. Gain an hour’s worth of understanding for an hour’s worth of effort, rather than a quantum leap in understanding after a week or month of effort.

Once you've written the imperative library/util code once, your components are super slim and completely reactive/declarative. Wow.

The yieldable objects currently supported are: promises thunks (functions) array (parallel execution) objects (parallel execution) generators (delegation) generator functions (delegation) Nested yieldable objects are supported, meaning you can nest promises within objects within arrays, and so on!

The power of await is that it lets you write asynchronous code using synchronous language constructs.

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Smalltalk image is unlike a collection of Java class files in that it can store your programs (both source and compiled bytecode), their data, and execution state. You can quit and save your work while some code is executing, move your image to an entirely different machine, load your image… and your program picks up where it left off.

Smalltalk has a virtual machine which allows you to execute your code on any platform where the VM can run. The image however is not only all your code, but the entire Smalltalk system, including said virtual machine (because of course it’s written in itself).

This was because dynamic typing doesn’t give the safety net that static typing does. So you write more tests. Which is a good thing.

I think one of the ways that remote work changes this is that I can do other things while I think through a tricky problem; I can do dishes or walk my dog or something instead of trying to look busy in a room with 6-12 other people who are furiously typing because that's how the manager and project manager understand that work gets done.

Python

The main idea behind the space-based pattern is the distributed shared memory to mitigate issues that frequently occur at the database level. The assumption is that by processing most of operations using in-memory data we can avoid extra operations in the database, thus any future problems that may evolve from there (for example, if your user activity data entity has changed, you don’t need to change a bunch of code persisting to & retrieving that data from the DB).The basic approach is to separate the application into processing units (that can automatically scale up and down based on demand), where the data will be replicated and processed between those units without any persistence to the central database (though there will be local storages for the occasion of system failures).

Microservices architecture consists of separately deployed services, where each service would have ideally single responsibility. Those services are independent of each other and if one service fails others will not stop running.

First of all, if you know the basics of architecture patterns, then it is easier for you to follow the requirements of your architect. Secondly, knowing those patterns will help you to make decisions in your code

Mikrokernel Architecture, also known as Plugin architecture, is the design pattern with two main components: a core system and plug-in modules (or extensions). A great example would be a Web browser (core system) where you can install endless extensions (or plugins).

The idea behind this pattern is to decouple the application logic into single-purpose event processing components that asynchronously receive and process events. This pattern is one of the popular distributed asynchronous architecture patterns known for high scalability and adaptability.

It is the most common architecture for monolithic applications. The basic idea behind the pattern is to divide the app logic into several layers each encapsulating specific role. For example, the Persistence layer would be responsible for the communication of your app with the database engine.

A model for understanding equality comparisons

Another option is the use the functional library Ramda, while the syntax may be a bit different from the Ruby and Pure JS version, I find it to be more declarive: list = [null, "say", "kenglish", "co", null] R.reject(R.isNil, list) // return new array [ 'say', 'kenglish', 'co' ]

In my method, program segments are embedded in the midst of a word processor document--like raisins in cake--so that the emphasis is on the explanation rather than the code.

Any language or system that does not allow full flowing and arbitrarily long comments is seriously behind the times. That we use escape characters to “escape” from code to comment is backwards. Ideally, comment should be the default, with a way to signal the occasional lines of code.

I'm not a naturally quick programmer. Learning to program was a real struggle for me and I was pretty slow at it for a long time (and I still am in aspects that I haven't practiced). My "one weird trick" is that I've explicitly worked on speeding up things that I do frequently and most people have not.

Wet behind the ears: the ones that have just started working as a professional programmers and need lots of guidance. Sort of knows what they are doing: professional programmers, who have sort of figured what is going on and can mostly finish their tasks on their own. Experienced: the ones who have been around the block for a while and are most likely the brains behind all the major design decisions of a large software project. Coworkers usually turn to them when they need advice for a hard technical problem. Some programmers will never reach this level, despite their official title stating otherwise (but more on that later).

The problem with the first approach is that it considers software development to be a deterministic process when, in fact, it’s stochastic. In other words, you can’t accurately determine how long it will take to write a particular piece of code unless you have already written it.

We would prefer: stay within single host language, but make code lookas declarative as possible.

you're guilty of making the same mistake as people who used to say that templates and styles and JavaScript should be in separate files

Build data pipelines, the easy way

This is what I call a leaky abstraction. TCP attempts to provide a complete abstraction of an underlying unreliable network, but sometimes, the network leaks through the abstraction and you feel the things that the abstraction can’t quite protect you from. This is but one example of what I’ve dubbed the Law of Leaky Abstractions:

I don’t even minify page assets

At the same time, details about programming language semantics are quite precise and when articles like this get things sort of wrong, it just leads to more confusion.

This post is about all the major disadvantages of Julia. Some of it will just be rants about things I particularly don't like - hopefully they will be informative, too.

I really hope they keep breaking it. Being the lead on a library for several years, most of the forced refactors were pretty straight forward and in almost every case made our code either more sound or easier to be consumed. Now I work on a runtime that embeds TypeScript and 3.5.1 has broken some code, thought it took me all of about 15 minutes to make the changes to adopt it, and in every case, it broke because we were being a bit loose with the types. While it didn't find any bugs, it made the code more "safe".

Changing every built-in function to accept anys would also "break" no one, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Part of TypeScript's value proposition is to catch errors; failing to catch an error is a reduction in that value and is something we have to weigh carefully against "Well maybe I meant that" cases.

Aside to global and local scope there is also something one could call a “block” scope. This is not an “official” type of scope, but it does exist. Block scope was introduced to JavaScript as a part of the ES6 specification. It was introduced along with two new types of variables let and const.

In javascript prettier-ignore ignores the next block, so what I did was just make the next few lines a block.

Rubyists don't call these things annotations. One of the things I like doing is to find common techniques that cross languages, for me this is a common technique and 'annotation' seems like a good generic word for it. I don't know if Rubyists will agree.

Languages may provide annotations in ways that don't reflect the syntax of the language

When writing about programming, I prefer to use 'annotation' as the general term. Although .NET was first, the word 'attribute' is just too widely used for different things.

An annotation on a program element (commonly a class, method, or field) is a piece of meta-data added to that program element which can be used to embellish that element with extra code.

When people talk about internal DSLs I see two styles: internal minilanguages and language enhancements.

Isolation ensures that concurrent execution of transactions leaves the database in the same state that would have been obtained if the transactions were executed sequentially

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treament.

We can also define these properties for data types that we do not control, for example providing a custom way of hashing a data type implemented by someone else

However, there is a definite trade off in these three snippets. The first one is overly specific but is understandable to any Scala programmer. The last one is beautiful and elegant if you understand the necessary concepts but incomprehensible otherwise.

ZIO ecosystem libraries generally do not directly expose any functional abstractions but still expose a highly compositional interface because their design is based on algebraic properties like this. Users don't have to learn about these abstractions unless they want to, they just get to benefit from better library design.

Open source is not a good business model.If you want to make money do literally anything else: try to sell software, do consulting, build a SAAS and charge monthly for it, rob a bank.

The only way for one person to even attempt cross-platform app is to use a UI abstraction layer like Qt, WxWidgets or Gtk.The problem is that Gtk is ugly, Qt is extremely bloated and WxWidgets barely works.

The visual and spacing differences between proportional and monospaced fonts