Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 05, 2025

• Rlang ☛ Running aggregate on wide matrices takes loooong; use nested apply or data tables instead !

  The aggregate function can be very useful in R, allowing one to run a function (e.g. mean) within groups of rows, in each column in a matrix/data-frame and organize the results in an easy-to-read table.

• Yoshua Wuyts ☛ Syntactic Musings on View Types

  Here's a silly little insight I had the other day: if you squint, both View Types and Pattern Types seem like lightweight forms of Refinement Types 1. Both will enable constraining types, but in slightly different and complementary ways. Let's take a look at this using an example of an RGB struct containing fields for individual Red, Green, and Blue channels stored as usize 2: [...]

• Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ (Un)coupling in distributed systems - Part 2

  In the previous post, we started to discuss a specific type of coupling, the coupling between processes in a distributed system. We discussed the fallacy that loose technical coupling, i.e., using a message-based communication style is sufficient to ensure loose coupling between processes. We learnt that instead we need to implement loose coupling at a technical and a functional level to actually become loosely coupled.

  In this second and final post of this little blog series, we will discuss the redundancy fallacy and the 3rd type of coupling, we need to consider in the context of remote communication, which is temporal coupling.

  Let us start with the redundancy fallacy.

• Unmitigated Risk ☛ Decision-making as a Product Manager | UNMITIGATED RISK

  Your most valuable contribution isn’t the individual decisions you make, but how you architect the feedback loops that transform customer interactions into organizational learning. By systematically capturing and applying these insights, you create not just a product but an ever-evolving organism that adapts and thrives in changing conditions.

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Learning OCaml: Regular Expressions

  One of the things that bothered me initially in OCaml was the poor support for working in regular expressions in the standard library. Technically speaking, there’s no support for them at all!

  What do I mean by this? Well, there’s the older Str library that provides support for regular expressions, but it’s: [...]

• Raymond Camden ☛ Scheduling Code in BoxLang

  Code wise, you load a BoxLang class that can define one or more tasks, each with it's own name, schedule, and code. This class can also define multiple different lifecycle events giving you the ability to run things before task execution, after it, and more. Let's look at a small example.

• Declan Chidlow ☛ Open-Source is Just That | Vale.Rocks

  As someone who has been known to write open-source software and contribute to open-source projects, I have some thoughts on the matter. Particularly, the growing sense of entitlement among users.

  When software is open-source, it means it is open-source – that the source is open – nothing more. This simple fact is frequently misunderstood, so let me be crystal clear about what open-source does not automatically mean by default: [...]

• Rlang ☛ Population pyramid plots with base R

  That’s quite a lot of dependencies, and my tiny app had quite a long load time, so I started whittling things down. The parquet files got replaced with .CSVs, so no need for arrow. fread() was gone, replaced with read.csv(). Good old fashioned base R replaced dplyr. plotly was gone and I was back to static ggplot2.

  But that by itself has a lot going on under the hood, so I figured I should try and use base graphics instead.

• Corrode.dev ☛ Pitfalls of Safe Rust

  When people say Rust is a “safe language”, they often mean memory safety. And while memory safety is a great start, it’s far from all it takes to build robust applications.

  Memory safety is important but not sufficient for overall reliability.

  In this article, I want to show you a few common gotchas in safe Rust that the compiler doesn’t detect and how to avoid them.

• Linux Journal ☛ Git on Linux: A Beginner’s Guide to Version Control and Project Management

  Version control is a fundamental tool in modern software development, enabling teams and individuals to track, manage, and collaborate on projects with confidence. Whether you're working on a simple script or a large-scale application, keeping track of changes, collaborating with others, and rolling back to previous versions are essential aspects of development. Among various version control systems, Git has emerged as the most widely used and trusted tool — especially on Linux, where it integrates seamlessly with the system's workflow.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ The Perl Toolchain Summit 2025 Needs You

    Photo © Salve J. Nilsen, 2023, CC-BY-NC-4.0

    This year in particular, the organizers have had difficulty reaching our fundraising targets for the Perl Toolchain Summit.

    In the words of Ricardo Signes: > The Perl Toolchain Summit is one of the most important events in the > year for Perl. A lot of key projects have folks get together to get > things done.

    Everyone who is invited to the Summit is a project leader or important contributor that is going to give their time and expertise for four days, to move the Perl toolchain forward. They give their time (sometimes having to take days off work, which is already a loss of income or holidays for them).

• Golang

  • Leon Mika ☛ On Go And Using Comments For Annotations

    It’s a little strange that Go doesn’t have first-class language features for annotations: arbitrary bits of non-executing metadata that you can add to the code base. There are struct tags, yes, but they’re only applicable for fields on a struct type. Nothing analogous really exists for functions, or even just files. And yet there seems to be a need for something to declare build flags, go generate commands, and lint opt-outs.

  • [Old] Luciano Nooijen ☛ My favourite way to handle SQL in Golang

    But this is not an article about why Go is great, but rather on how to handle SQL. Considering Golang is not made to be used in Ruby on Rails-type frameworks, you’ll most likely have to set up the SQL-logic yourself.

    My approach to SQL handling in Golang is the result of trying out a lot of approaches and seeing what works and what doesn’t. This approach is mostly aimed at building API services, backed by a database. In my case, I use Postgresql, though other SQL databases should also work with a few tweaks.

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: C ABI Changes for `wasm32-unknown-unknown`

    The extern "C" ABI for the wasm32-unknown-unknown target has been using a non-standard definition since the inception of the target in that it does not implement the official C ABI of WebAssembly and it additionally leaks internal compiler implementation details of both the Rust compiler and LLVM. This will change in a future version of the Rust compiler and the official C ABI will be used instead.

    This post details some history behind this change and the rationale for why it's being announced here, but you can skip straight to "Am I affected?" as well.

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Help us create a vision for Rust's future

    tl;dr: Please take our survey here

    Rust turns 10 this year. It's a good time to step back and assess where we are at and to get aligned around where we should be going. Where is Rust succeeding at empowering everyone to build reliable, efficient software (as it says on our webpage)? Where are there opportunities to do better? To that end, we have taken on the goal of authoring a Rust Vision RFC, with the first milestone being to prepare a draft for review at the upcoming Rust All Hands.

    Goals and non-goals