Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 23, 2025

• Leon Mika ☛ Devlog: UCL - Comparing UCL To Some Early Ideas

  I was browsing through some very old notes I had when I came across one that contain an idea for a hypothetical shell-like command language, sort of what UCL was designed for. It was designed for a project called Nuget, which was a CLI torrent downloader (now defunct). Much like UCL, it was REPL based with a simple token-based command language, and I was thinking of ways to extend this to including scripting. Here’s the note in full: [...]

• James Sinclair ☛ Rendering mazes on the web

  In the last article, we discussed building mazes using recursion and immutable data structures. But all we did there is create a graph. That is, we built a data structure in memory. We didn’t talk at all about how we render it. But the beauty of the web platform is that we have so many options. In this article, we’re going to cover three different ways to render a maze: [...]

• Andrew Healey ☛ Icepath: a 2D Programming Language

  I've made a little 2D programming language called Icepath. Named after the ice puzzles in Pokémon Gold and Silver. The vibe I was going for was sliding around a cave and hitting opcodes.

  Below, you can see a program running. The program's source code is also a map of execution. Take a second and see if you can reverse engineer how it works and what the opcodes do.

• Karl Seguin ☛ I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

  You might have heard that Zig 0.15 introduces a new IO interface, with the focus for this release being the new std.Io.Reader and std.Io.Writer types. The old "interfaces" had problems. Like this performance issue that I opened. And it relied on a mix of types, which always confused me, and a lot of anytype - which is generally great, but a poor foundation to build an interface on.

• [Old] Sean McPherson ☛ Writing code was never the bottleneck in software engineering

  But in a software-development environment, the equation changes. Requirements, understanding, reviews, and testing take priority. In that world, generating huge swaths of code with LLMs only exacerbates the true bottlenecks of software engineering. The craft becomes learning how to use them well without creating more problems for your team down the road.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Step-by-Step Guide to Use R and Selenium to Scrape Empleos Publicos (Part 2)

    To read the HTML it is the same as before but the page may have changes: [...]

  • Rlang ☛ Step-by-Step Guide to Use R and Selenium to Scrape Empleos Publicos (Part 3)

    From this table, I can proceed reading the HTML for each job offer and see how it is structured. Starting with the first URL: [...]

• Python

  • Bruno Rodrigues ☛ Python needs its CRAN – Econometrics and Free Software

    How is it that in the year 2025 of our Lord installing a Python package is still such a gamble?

    This post comes from someone that rarely uses Python, but consider the following: [...]

• Standards/Consortia

  • Tim Bray ☛ RFC 9839 and Bad Unicode

    Unicode is good. If you’re designing a data structure or protocol that has text fields, they should contain Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8. There’s another question, though: “Which Unicode characters?” The answer is “Not all of them, please exclude some.”

    This issue keeps coming up, so Paul Hoffman and I put together an individual-submission draft to the IETF and now (where by “now” I mean “two years later”) it’s been published as RFC 9839. It explains which characters are bad, and why, then offers three plausible less-bad subsets that you might want to use. Herewith a bit of background, but…

    Please · If you’re actually working on something new that will have text fields, please read the RFC. It’s only ten pages long, and that’s with all the IETF boilerplate. It’s written specifically for software and networking people.