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Programming Leftovers
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Rlang ☛ Beyond the Basics: Books to Supercharge Your R Skills
There are a plethora of great books that are widely recommended for the beginner R user, but I many users often find their skills plateauing once they learn just enough to get by on a day-to-day basis.
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Rlang ☛ Counting Digits Quickly
When things run slower than we’d like in R we tend to reach for another, usually
compiled, language, and move our code there. -
Rlang ☛ ggplot dotplot using R | geom_dotplot, dot plot using ggplot2
Beyond just plotting points on a chart, how can you transform a simple ggplot dotplot into a powerful narrative tool that reveals the hidden stories within your data's distribution, all while avoiding the common pitfalls of visual clutter and misinterpretation? -
Uğur Erdem Seyfi ☛ Making JavaScript Simple Again
This essay presents a list of reflections on my attempts to create a simple workflow for building front-end applications using vanilla JavaScript. I first discuss what it was like to code when I first started programming and the things that I enjoyed about it. Then I walk through several approaches I tried in the pursuit of simplicity and also share the problems I ran into meanwhile. Later, I show how we can make use of libraries such as Hyperscript and Snabbdom to resolve those issues without giving up on our simplicity ideals.
I don’t aim to convince anyone to adopt the workflows presented in this essay but simply to share my experience with others who might share the same concerns about simplicity.
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James Stanley ☛ The Story of Max, a Real Programmer
You might think that Max's practices make for a maintenance nightmare. But I've been "maintaining" it for the last 15 years and I haven't found it to be a nightmare. It's so simple that nothing goes wrong. I expect I'd have much more trouble getting my Go code to keep running for the next 15 years.
And yeah we all scoff at these stupid outdated practices, but what's our answer? We make a grand effort to write a simpler, better, modern replacement, and it ends up twice as complicated and worse?
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Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ Thoughts on AI and software development - Part 4
In the previous post, we looked at the likely short- and mid-term consequences if Steve’s projection should become reality. We saw a bit disturbed that most likely the only winners of that projection would be the providers of agentic AI solutions and their investors while everyone else would be on the loser side of the game.
In this post, we will complete our analysis by looking at some side effects and unresolved questions that would come with such a future.
Let us get started …
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The New Stack ☛ What Can We Learn From History's Most Bizarre Software Bugs?
“I’ve always been fascinated by how much we humans run on autopilot,” Mia Bajić says in an email interview. So last month for PyCon US 2025, the EuroPython Society vice chair identified “the most bizarre software bugs in history.”
And sometimes they were even delightfully illustrated with stick figures…
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Python
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Christian Hammond ☛ Tip: Use keyword-only arguments in Python dataclasses
Python dataclasses are a really nice feature for constructing classes that primarily hold or work with data. They can be a good alternative to using dictionaries, since they allow you to add methods, dynamic properties, and subclasses. They can also be a good alternative to building your own class by hand, since they don’t need a custom __init__() that reassigns attributes and provide methods like __eq__() out of the box.
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