Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 12, 2025

• David Buchanan ☛ Stop Saying "Responsible Disclosure"

  Saying "coordinated disclosure" is better but it doesn't answer the question, it just replaces it with a new one: "in coordination with whom?"

  I prefer to say something like "vendor-coordinated disclosure", "maintainer-coordinated disclosure", or even "user-coordinated disclosure" (and they're not mutually exclusive!)

• Sean Goedecke ☛ The importance of virtue in software engineering

  There are approximately one million books about learning software engineering skills and approximately zero books about software engineering character. It’s a bit unfashionable today to talk about virtue, for some reason. Maybe because it’s harder to quantify, or because it feels too personal. But it’s still important. I have worked with very, very smart engineers who were held back by their lack of virtue.

• Dave Gauer ☛ I learned Snobol and then wrote a toy Forth - ratfactor

  In short, I think Snobol is fascinating. The singular focus on pattern matching kind of reminds me of Awk. Except Awk doesn’t do nearly as much with patterns, it devolves into a C-like script to do things with pattern matches. Snobol uses no such crutches, just pattern matching statements for all logic and control flow. Its purity is impressive.

  No kidding: Every single line_ in a Snobol program consists of five parts: label, subject, pattern, replacement, goto. All of those parts are optional.

• Tim Kellogg ☛ I was wrong: AI Won't Overtake Software Engineering

  On the surface it was stuff like, I’m comfortable in the terminal, he was not. And I don’t freak out when I get a huge error. But also softer skills, like how I know what complex code looks like vs simple code (with AI coding, overly complex code will cause an agent to deadlock). Also, he tried including authentication in the earliest version (lol n00b).

  For some people, those are merely road blocks. I’ve talked to a few people with zero technical background that are absolutely crushing it with code right now. It’s hard, but they have the drive to push through the hard parts. Sure, they’ve got their fair share of total flops, but they a strong will and push through.

• Pivot to AI ☛ Study: Your coworkers hate you for using AI at work

  Will AI help you in your career? No. Not if anyone finds out, anyway.

  Today in science discovering the obvious, if you use chatbots to pump out the AI slop at work, your coworkers think you’re an incompetent and lazy arse. And they are absolutely judging you for it.

• Wired ☛ Dismantling NOAA Threatens the World’s Ability to Monitor Carbon Dioxide Levels

  There are trillions upon trillions of numbers in the world. We use numbers to describe almost every conceivable thing in the universe. But there is one number that surpasses all others for the enormous impact it will have on every living thing on Earth over the next few thousand years. We consider it so important that we’ve dedicated our lives to acquiring and understanding it. Today that number happens to be: 427.6.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSMC 0.2.8 on CRAN: Maintenance

  Release 0.2.8 of our RcppSMC package arrived at CRAN yesterday. RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his JSS article. Sequential Monte Carlo is also referred to as Particle Filter in some contexts. The package now also features the Google Summer of Code work by Leah South in 2017, and by Ilya Zarubin in

  This release is somewhat procedural and contains solely maintenance, either for items now highlighted by the R and CRAN package checks, or to package internals. We had made those changes at the GitHub repo over time since the last release two years ago, and it seemed like a good time to get them to CRAN now.

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Count Difference with Raku

    You are given an array of integers.

    Write a script to return the maximum between the number of positive and negative integers. Zero is neither positive nor negative.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • University of Toronto ☛ Some notes on using 'join' to supplement one file with data from another

    Recently I said something vaguely grumpy about the venerable Unix 'join' tool. As the POSIX specification page for join will unhelpfully tell you, join is a 'relational database operator', which means that it implements the rough equivalent of SQL joins. One way to use join is to add additional information for some lines in your input data.