Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 06, 2025

• Max Bernstein ☛ Precedence climbing

  I wrote a sample precedence-climbing expression parser. I wrote it for Patrick Dubroy’s excellent small website for small programs, which uses docco to pull out code comments into a side pane next to the code and make everything look pretty.

• Thierry Moudiki ☛ Survival stacking: survival analysis translated as supervised classification in R and Python

  Survival analysis is a branch of statistics that deals with the analysis of time-to-event data. It is commonly used in fields such as medicine, engineering, and social sciences to study the time until an event occurs, such as death, failure, or relapse.

  Survival stacking is a method that allows you to use any classifier for survival analysis. It works by transforming the survival data into a format that can be used with supervised classifiers, and then applying the classifier to this transformed data.

  This method is particularly useful when you want to leverage the power of machine learning algorithms for survival analysis, as it allows you to use a wide range of classifiers without having to worry about the specific requirements of survival analysis.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ The Tumultuous Evolution of the Design Profession

  The hard truth, as pointed out in the article, is this: bad design doesn’t hurt profit margins. Or at least there’s no immediately-obvious, concrete data or correlation that proves this. So most decision makers don’t care.

  You know what does help profit margins? Spending less money. Cost-savings initiatives. Those always provide a direct, immediate, seemingly-obvious correlation. So those initiatives get prioritized.

• Keith Harrison ☛ SwiftData Predicates For Parent Relationships

  The workaround is to introduce a temporary variable, outside of the macro, when constructing the predicate: [...]

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2025.17/18 Coordinated Dancing

    Richard Hainsworth continued their journey in allowing visitors to the Raku documentation site to be able to suggest changes with minimal fuss, in: A coordinated dance to identify the editor. Fernando’s Corner Fernando Correa de Oliveira didn’t forget testing of Raku applications in: Testing Raku Applications with Cro, Red, and RedFactory.

• Python

  • The New Stack ☛ Understanding the Python ‘And’ Operator: Usage, Examples and Best Practices

    The “and” operator in Python is a gateway for combining logic statements, a decision maker for if, else, and more.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Artyom Bologov ☛ Transparent UIs

    Now the next step in editor evolution was vi. And Emacs. And vim. And nano. Screen/visual command-oriented editors. All relying on CRTs and full-screen terminal programs.

    This extrapolates to other programs too. You look at the screen showing the data you're acting on. And you use commands (usually bound to keyboard keys) to act on it.

  • TecMint ☛ Learning Shell Scripting: A Guide from Newbies to System Administrator

    This guide will walk you through everything you need to know, from absolute basics to more advanced scripting concepts that system administrators use every day.

• R

  • Rlang ☛ Simulating A Simple Response Adaptive Randomization – I Have To See It To Believe It

    In my simulations of Response Adaptive Randomization, I discovered it performs comparably to fixed 50-50 allocation in identifying treatment effects. The adaptive approach does appear to work! However, with only 10 trials, I’ve merely scratched the surface.

  • Rlang ☛ New R/exams Version: exams2forms, Written NOPS Exams, and More

    New CRAN releases of the R/exams package and the accompanying exams2forms package with many new features and enhancements, especially for the written multiple-choice exams (NOPS).

  • Rlang ☛ Survival stacking: survival analysis translated as supervised classification in R and Python

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing rustup 1.28.2

    The rustup team is happy to announce the release of rustup version 1.28.2. Rustup is the recommended tool to install Rust, a programming language that empowers everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

    What's new in rustup 1.28.2

    The headlines of this release are: [...]

  • This Month in Redox - April 2025

    It’s that time of year again - Redox Summer of Code (RSoC) has engaged two students and one recent graduate for some exciting projects.