Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 08, 2023

• checks and {tiny}testing – a quick primer

  A quick intro to checking and testing your functions, with help from {checkmate} and {tinytest}

• Enneper surface with square checkerboard

• September 2023 monthly update

  Welcome to this September 2023 update! I had Burger Party and Nanonote releases planned for this month, but that did not happen. I did however release version 0.25.1 of Pixel Wheels.

• Incentives Behind Programming Languages

  Programming languages are expensive to develop. They take expert programmers with a deep technical skill set. They require probably a decade of development to reach maturity. For example, Go took five years to reach version 1.0, with top-tier engineers working on it (Rob Pike, Robert Griesemer, and Ken Thompson). Not to mention the other supporting roles: developer relations, hosting (for languages with package managers), and more. Research grants might not cover the cost of developing a language anymore (as they did for something like Python).

• Retrospective: Metaculus Quarterly Cup

  Clearly, statistical modeling is where I have an edge over the community. In not a single question where I did model my forecast statistically did I perform worse than the community. Unfortunately, I only had time to lay out models for a few questions.

  However, I think I could have applied some light modeling to more questions than I did, and I think I could have benefited from that. See the next section for a concrete example.

• Web server ‘hello world’ benchmark : Go vs Node.js vs Nim vs Bun

  There are many popular frameworks for writing little web applications. Go and JavaScript (Node.js) are among the most popular choices. Reportedly, Netflix runs on Node.js; Uber moved from Node.js to Go for better performance. There are also less popular options such as Nim. An in-depth review of their performance characteristics would be challenging.

• How to use the JavaScript Compression Streams API to (de)compress strings

  This post is written for people familiar with JavaScript.