Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 03, 2025

• Henrik Warne ☛ More Good Programming Quotes, Part 6

  Here are more good programming quotes I have found since my last post.

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Learning OCaml: Functions without Parameters

  To people coming from “conventional” programming languages this might look like calling a function/method without any arguments. (e.g. foo() in Python) Of course, function application in OCaml is quite different from JavaScript, Python and the like - the function arguments are space separated and simply follow the function’s name: [...]

• Mastering Emacs ☛ What's New in Emacs 30.1? - Mastering Emacs

  emacs 30.1 is upon us, and it’s time for another bumper release full of new features and improvements.

  As always, I have taken the time to go through most of the changes in Emacs 30.1 and annotated them to give perspective and clarity.

  Here is but a few of the highlights in 30.1: [...]

• Chris Wellons ☛ Robust Wavefront OBJ model parsing in C

  Wavefront OBJ is a line-oriented, text format for 3D geometry. It’s widely supported by modeling software, easy to parse, and trivial to emit, much like Netpbm for 2D image data. Poke around hobby 3D graphics projects and you’re likely to find a bespoke OBJ parser. While typically only loading their own model data, so robustness doesn’t much matter, they usually have hard limitations and don’t stand up to fuzz testing. This article presents a robust, partial OBJ parser in C with no hard-coded limitations, written from scratch. Like similar articles, it’s not really about OBJ but demonstrating some techniques you’ve probably never seen before.

• Ruud van Asseldonk ☛ A float walks into a gradual type system

  I am building a new configuration language: RCL. It’s a gradually typed superset of json that extends json into a simple functional language that enables abstraction and reuse. Its main purpose is to generate json, yaml, and toml files, but it makes a pretty good json query tool too. Think jq, but without having to ask an LLM to write the query for you. While RCL supported integers early on, it was missing one piece to deliver on the json superset promise: floats — numbers that contain a decimal point. Adding floats to RCL was tough, because several guiding principles are in conflict. In this post we will explore the trade-offs involved.

• Rlang ☛ CRAN-like repository for most recent releases ot Techtonique’s R packages

  If you’re looking for most recent releases of Techtonique’s R packages like ahead, bayesianrvfl, bcn, learningmachine, or esgtoolkit (not available on CRAN), you can use the CRAN-like repository located at: https://r-packages.techtonique.net.

• Bartosz Sypytkowski ☛ Is Rust a good fit for business apps?

  But what do I mean by term business apps? Nowadays, its all sorts of services targeting various kinds of user/asset management, be it a bank portal, online shop or any other sort of ERP systems. This also covers ETL to huge extend, as they bring your focus outside of main concerns that Rust shines in.

  These systems usually have similar shell: a web service providing some API, a database to manage system information and all sorts of other service connectors.

• The New Stack ☛ 10 Open Source Tools to Supercharge Your Coding Game [Ed: Jack Wallen promotes Microsoft spyware Visual Studio Code; that's not "Open Source Tools". Did the editor not watch this error?]

  If you’re looking to improve your productivity, there’s a metaphorical ton of apps you can try. For those who prefer

• R

  • Rlang ☛ Imaginary Dust

  • Rlang ☛ Working with Clinical Trial Data? There’s a Pharmaverse Package for That

    Working with clinical trial data is no small task.

  • Rlang ☛ January 2025 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

    In January, one hundred eighty-six new packages made it to CRAN. >

• Python

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Overview of Content Published in February

• Golang

  • Raymond Camden ☛ Introducing BoxLang - Scripting for the JVM

    BoxLang is open source and free, with the company behind it, Ortus Solutions, offering professional services on top. If you come from the ColdFusion world, you know Ortus has been around a while and has created a huge amount of value on top of CFML. If you know nothing at all about ColdFusion, well, that's fine too. ;)