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Programming Leftovers
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Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Trying out import std
Since C++ compilers are starting to support import std, I ran a few experiments to see what the status of that is. GCC 15 on latest Ubuntu was used for all of the following.
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Custom git ignores with a global gitignore file or git exclude
Two main options are a global ignore file and using git exclude. Marijke Luttekes has a brilliant post that inspired this one where she goes more in-depth into the differences and when to use which. You should check that out as I won’t go that deep into the matter in this post, I just want to share good starting points for learning more.
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Paul Tarvydas ☛ Type Checking is a Symptom, Not a Solution
But step back and ask a simple question: Why do we need type checking at all?
The standard answer is scale. “Small programs don’t need types,” the reasoning goes, “but large programs become unmaintainable without them.” This sounds reasonable until you realize what we’re actually admitting: that we’ve designed our systems to be inherently incomprehensible to human reasoning. We’ve created architectures so tangled, so dependent on invisible connections and implicit behaviors, that we need automated tools just to verify that our programs won’t crash in obvious ways.
Type checking, in other words, is not a solution to complexity—it’s a confession that we’ve created unnecessary complexity in the first place.