Programming and Licensing

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 19, 2024

• [Repeat] Buttondown ☛ Unusual basis types in programming languages

  Here are the five essential "basis" types in all modern programming languages: [...]

• Bert Hubert ☛ A 2024 Plea for Lean Software (with running code)

  In this post I briefly go over the terrible state of software security, and then spend some time on why it is so bad. I also mention some regulatory/legislative things going on that we might use to make software quality a priority again. Finally, I talk about an actual useful piece of software I wrote as a reality check of the idea that one can still make minimal and simple yet modern software.

  I hope that this post provides some mental and moral support for suffering programmers and technologists who want to improve things. It is not just you, we are not merely suffering from nostalgia: software really is very weird today.

• Olaf Alders ☛ Using Tig to Make Sense of Git

  If you work with Git as your version control system, you’ve likely already resigned yourself to the fact that Git is a complicated beast. Git is a fantastic tool, but it can be cumbersome to navigate repositories, logs, the stash, etc. That’s where a tool like Tig comes in.

• Rlang ☛ Reading and Writing Data with {arrow}

  Apache Arrow is a cross-language development platform for in-memory data. As it’s in-memory (as opposed to data stored on disk), it provides additional speed boosts. It’s designed for efficient analytic operations, and uses a standardised language-independent columnar memory format for flat and hierarchical data. The {arrow} R package provides an interface to the ‘Arrow C++’ library – an efficient package for analytic operations on modern hardware.

  There are many great tutorials on using {arrow} (see the links at the bottom of the post for example). The purpose of this blog post isn’t to simply reproduce a few examples, but to understand some of what’s happening behind the scenes. In this particular post, we’re interested in understanding the reading/writing aspects of {arrow}.

• Modus Create LLC ☛ A look under GHC's hood: desugaring linear types

  Figuring all this out is the job of the typechecker. The typechecker is carefully designed; it’s actually very easy to come up with a sound type system which is undecidable. But even then, decidability is not enough: we don’t want inversion of the True and the False equations of f to change the result of the typechecker. Nor should pulling part of a term in a let let s = show x ++ show y in [ toUpper c | c <- s ]. We want the algorithm to be stable and predictable.

• Python

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Syntax Error #11: Debugging Python

    Syntax Error is a newsletter about debugging for developers, students, hobbyists, curious and duck fans. In this January issue of Syntax Error I shared my recent conference and meetup talk Debugging Python in written form. Read full article at syntaxerror.tech/syntax-error-11-debugging-python/ and either subscribe to the email or RSS feed to catch all of them.

• GNU and GPL Licensing (Legal)

  • Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL? [Ed: It can strengthen the pair of people who try to cancel the founders of GPL]

    Traditionally, open source licenses have been enforced through the law of copyright. In other words, the key question has been did copying occur, and if so, were the rights of the author violated? This has a subtle, but very important effect: only the author can initiate the lawsuit. In addition in the United States, such lawsuits must be filed in federal court, rather than in state courts, and the remedies available are primarily financial.

    However, arguably, open source licenses could also be enforced through the law of contracts. Contracts can be about copyright, but in general they are a different beast. In the United States, remedies for contracts can include what is called "specific performance”—in other words, a judge can order someone who has broken a contract to do a specific act. Contracts also are typically enforced through state courts, not federal courts.

  • LWN ☛ Villa: Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL?

    Luis Villa writes about the recent ruling in the Software Freedom Conservancy's GPL-violation lawsuit against Vizio, wherein the judge refused to agree that the SFC lacks standing to sue.

  • Education

    • FSF ☛ Support EmacsConf through the Working Together for Free Software Fund

      We were thrilled to see that up to 250 people were watching EmacsConf 2023 via the livestream, and more than 80 people joined the live Q&A web conferences. It was fantastic to see people from all over the world. There were even satellite events in Switzerland and Slovenia. We had 41 talks across two tracks (general and development), with a total of 16 hours of presentations, 12 hours of Q&A via web conference, and lots of lively discussion across IRC and Etherpad.