Programming Leftovers
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Buttondown ☛ "Testing can show the presence of bugs but not the absence"
Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence! — Edgar Dijkstra, Notes on Structured Programming
Dijkstra was famous for his spicy quips; he'd feel right at home on tech social control media. He said things he knows aren't absolutely true but will get people listening to him. In the same essay he discusses how testing could, in specific cases, show the absence of bugs: [...]
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Jon Udell ☛ The future of SQL: conversational hands-on problem solving
Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS: [...]
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Hackaday ☛ Programming Ada: First Steps On The Desktop
Who doesn’t want to use a programming language that is designed to be reliable, straightforward to learn and also happens to be certified for everything from avionics to rockets and ICBMs? Despite Ada’s strong roots and impressive legacy, it has the reputation among the average hobbyist of being ‘complicated’ and ‘obscure’, yet this couldn’t be further from the truth, as previously explained. In fact, anyone who has some or even no programming experience can learn Ada, as the very premise of Ada is that it removes complexity and ambiguity from programming.
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SANS ☛ Struts "devmode": Still a problem ten years later, (Tue, Apr 23rd)
Like many similar frameworks and languages, Struts 2 has a "developer mode" (devmode) offering additional features to aid debugging. Error messages will be more verbose, and the devmode includes an OGNL console. OGNL, the Object-Graph Navigation Language, can interact with Java, but in the end, executing OGNL results in arbitrary code execution. This OGNL console resembles a "web shell" built into devmode.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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It's FOSS ☛ How to Make Bash Function Return Value
By default, functions in bash do not return value. There are a couple of workarounds that may help to some extent.
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