Programming Leftovers
-
Robin Schroer ☛ Programming Language Scalability
Scalability is often at odds with peak effectiveness, the maximum effectiveness of an engineer who is intimately familiar with the codebase, because the features driving peak effectiveness are often enabling abstractions tailored towards the specific use case at hand, like macros and support for domain-specific languages. These abstractions can make domain experts more effective, but present an additional barrier to entry to everyone else. At the extreme end of this spectrum sit code golf languages.
-
Ben Tsai ☛ Who Knows?
It’s not just a matter of talking to customers. I used to make noise about the fact that engineers don’t get as many opportunities to interact with customers. I still do make noise about it, but I’ve also come to see how the context and framing around that interaction makes a difference.
-
University of Toronto ☛ Don't require people to change 'source code' to configure your programs
Often, programs have build time configuration settings for features they include, paths they use, and so on. Some of the time, people suggest that the way to handle these is not through systems like 'configure' scripts (whether produced by Autoconf or some other means) but instead by having people edit their settings into things such as your Makefiles or header files ('source code' in a broad sense). As someone who has spent a bunch of time and effort building other people's software over the years, my strong opinion is that you should not do this.
-
Python
-
Wired ☛ How I Became a Python Programmer—and Fell Out of Love With the Machine
That website turned out well. It led to another. And another. Eventually I had a small business building Django-based websites. It took a couple of years, but I wrapped my head around Python and got to the point where, given a problem, I could work out a way to solve it.
But here’s what surprised me: I never went any deeper. Never wanted to. Python falls about midway down the stack, but it’s unique in its ability to move in either direction. You can work at the highest levels of abstraction and spit out HTML websites (Django’s specialty), but you can also get closer to the machine through an API that lets you import C modules. Working in Python, I could build anything I ever wanted to build. At a certain point, I realized I wasn’t even thinking about the stack anymore. I was just thinking about the possibilities.
-
-
Devices/Embedded
-
HoneytreeLabs ☛ Boosting Embedded System Development: A Case for Rapid Testing
We are showcasing how parallel testing with embedded systems significantly boosts test execution efficiency, especially when strategically scaling the number of devices under test.
-