Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 31, 2025

• Buttondown LLC ☛ 2000 words about arrays and tables

  I'm way too discombobulated from getting next month's release of Logic for Programmers ready, so I'm pulling a idea from the slush pile. Basically I wanted to come up with a mental model of arrays as a concept that explained APL-style multidimensional arrays and tables but also why there weren't multitables.

• Michael Kohl ☛ We lost something along the way

  I’m glad I did this. It’s good to look outside the ecosystems you use regularly. And the post I linked at the start of this thread was right: it did indeed feel like we lost something, mainly the ability to just write code and get things done, without layer upon layer of incidental complexity on top. It’s not only about getting things done either, it’s also about how approachable our industry is to newcomers. Learning programming is hard enough without also having to learn about all these other things, and I’m afraid we’re losing a lot of potentially great people because of this. Writing software can be an incredibly rewarding and stimulating experience, and I want more people to be able to experience this. Let’s say no to overly complicated stacks and treating every side-project like it’s the next unicorn and embrace simplicity and having fewer barriers between an idea and working code.

• Sandor Dargo ☛ Format your own type (Part 2) | Sandor Dargo's Blog

  Last week, we discussed how to write our own formatter and finished with a relatively simple solution for printing a struct called ProgrammingLanguage. Today, we’ll take it to the next level.

• OBS: Refining Your Notifications

  We’re back with a couple of features and improvements that landed recently. Together with some performance enhancements, these updates, driven by your feedback, aim to improve your experience with the OBS notifications. Get What You Need If you find yourself receiving a high volume of notifications, we highly recommend visiting your subscriptions page to fine-tune what you see.

• Hackaday ☛ Linux Fu: The Cheap Macropad Conundrum

  You can get cheap no-brand macropads for almost nothing now. Some of them have just a couple of keys. Others have lots of keys, knobs, and LEDs. You can spring for a name brand, and it’ll be a good bet that it runs QMK. But the cheap ones? Get ready to download Windows-only software from suspicious Google Drive accounts. Will they work with Linux? Maybe.

• Python

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Better alternative to shell scripts with Python, uv and pytest

    Performing all sorts of small tasks and automations with shell scripts is a superpower for software developers, IT admins and other people working with computers.

    I’ve been writing bash scripts for 15+ years to solve my problems but no matter how much I studied and practiced the craft, I always felt insecure about my scripts, felt they were error-prone and had to do a lot of manual testing to get them right.

    With a few new additions to Python language and its tool ecosystem, it’s now better equipped for writing self-contained small scripts to replace shell scripts.