Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 07, 2024

• Facundo Olano ☛ Are We Living in a Simulation?

  This is the dilemma. Software engineers must choose between imaginary software—where they get to envision and design and architect, where they have agency but their decisions are ultimately meaningless—and legacy software—where decisions have already been made and change is heavily constrained.

  The software engineer has to choose.

  I made my choice.

• Modus Create LLC ☛ Adding algebraic data types to Nickel

  Our Nickel language is a configuration language. It’s also a functional programming language. Functional programming isn’t a well-defined term: it can encompass anything from being vaguely able to pass functions as arguments and to call them (in that respect, C and JavaScript are functional) to being a statically typed, pure and immutable language based on the lambda-calculus, like Haskell.

• Evan Hahn ☛ Using ESLint to (help) avoid non-deterministic randomness

  I was working on a game that has randomness. After some play testing, I decided I wanted that randomness to be deterministic—in other words, I needed to seed the random number generator. I wanted players to be able to share seeds so they could play the same games.

• Otávio C ☛ Replacing Type Methods to Improve Testability

  Whether we like them or not, type methods, also known as class methods or static methods, are heavily used in Swift and are part of our daily lives as engineers.

  From analytics trackers to requesting system permissions, we’ve all encountered type methods from external libraries that we have no control over. Testing code that interacts with them might seem difficult without using method swizzling, but fortunately, this isn't always the case.

• Chris ☛ Bubble Sort Is Not Robust Either

• Silicon Angle ☛ Laravel raises $57M to expand team and support open-source development

  Laravel Holdings Inc., the company behind the open-source Laravel PHP web application framework, announced today that it has raised $57 million in new funding from Accel Partners LP to support open-source development and its new cloud platform aimed at simplifying application deployment.

• KDAB ☛ Synchronization Primitives in C++20

  In C++20, the standard library introduced new synchronization primitives: std::latch and std::barrier. These are the utilities designed to coordinate between concurrent threads. What is a synchronization primitive? In concurrent programming, synchronization primitives are the fundamental tools that help in managing the coordination, execution order, and data safety of multiple threads or processes that run concurrently.

• R

  • Rlang ☛ Harness the Full Potential of Case-Insensitive Searches with grep() in R

    The grep() function in R is a powerful tool for searching and matching patterns within text data. It is commonly used in data cleaning, manipulation, and text analysis to find specific patterns or values in strings or data frames. By default, grep() performs a case-sensitive search, meaning it distinguishes between uppercase and lowercase characters.

    This case sensitivity can be restrictive in scenarios where you want to match text regardless of case. Fortunately, grep() has an ignore.case argument that allows for case-insensitive matching, making it more flexible and powerful in handling textual data.

  • Rlang ☛ R-Change Number of Bins in Histogram

    R-Change Number of Bins in Histogram, the default number of bins is determined by Sturges’ Rule.

    However, you can override this rule by specifying a specific number of bins using the breaks argument in the hist function.

  • Rlang ☛ Resources For Using R With Screen Readers

    R is a language and environment for statistical computing.
    There are several tools and approaches for interacting with R, but not all are accessible with screen readers.
    

  • Rlang ☛ C Programming Data Types: A Comprehensive Guide to Characters, Integers, and Floating Points

    C programming data types are fundamental building blocks that define how data is stored and manipulated in a program. Understanding these data types is crucial for writing efficient and error-free code.

  • Rlang ☛ Side by Side Comparison – Gleam vs R

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Guarding Against Misleading Data

      In the complex world of business intelligence (BI), the ability to present data accurately and transparently is critical. Whether crafting a dashboard for executive decision-making or generating a report for operational analysis, the clarity and honesty of data visualization can make or break the effectiveness of the message. This is where the International Business Communication Standards (IBCS) come into play, offering a robust framework to ensure that data is communicated in a way that is both truthful and impactful.