Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 02, 2025

• Annie Mueller ☛ Two small UI things that might not bother me if I were a completely different person

  But I am who I am and these two small very small really inconsequential things enrage me so here we are

• Great Lakes Consulting Services Inc ☛ Integrating Julia and MATLAB: Julia and MATLAB Can Coexist

  But is MATLAB the best option in all cases? Now, there's this trade-off between speed and what I'll call reputation. MATLAB has an incredibly good reputation. It has excellent tooling. It's robust and it has a ton of other awesome features. It has gained a reputation for being reliable and it is an established industry standard. Large companies may have hundreds of MATLAB models and thousands upon thousands of lines of MATLAB code. But that makes it impractical to switch all this MATLAB code entirely over to Julia all at once.

  However, there may be instances where MATLAB isn't the best choice to use. For example, if you have performance critical or large-scale models where speed is absolutely paramount, a language like Julia may be more suitable for those cases. Let's look at some concrete numbers.

• Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.119 released

  Version 0.119 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ How I maintain release notes for curl

  I believe a good product needs clear and thorough documentation. I think shipping a quality product requires you to provide detailed and informative release notes. I try to live up to this in the curl project, and this is how we do it.

• Sergio Visinoni ☛ The benefits of Strategic Domain-Driven Design

  In recent months, I found myself resorting repeatedly to Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and more specifically, its strategic component, in the work I do with different clients. Some of them are familiar or well-versed with the approach, while others are surprisingly struggling to leverage its full potential.

  Today’s article is a high-level overview of what strategic DDD is, why it matters for CTOs, and how you can get started with it.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: #052: Running r-ci with Coverage

  Welcome to post 52 in the R⁴ series.

  Following up on the post #51 yesterday and its stated intent of posting some more here… The r-ci setup (which was introduced in post #32 and updated in post #45) offers portable continuous integration which can take advantage of different backends: Microsoft's proprietary prison Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub Actions, Microsoft trap Azure Pipelines, GitLab, BitBuckets, … and possibly as it only requires a basic Ubuntu shell after which it customizes itself and runs via shell script. Portably. Now, most of us, I suspect still use it with Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub Actions but it is reassuring to know that one can take it elsewhere should the need or desire arise.

• What’s the Thing About Design Systems? – A Look at Organizing Designers and Developers in a Design-First Approach

  Design Systems is a relatively new concept that aims to organize the way design happens in structured systems such as applications, websites, organizations, etc.

  Historically, working with graphics for the digital age has been unorganized, lives in personal computers, is not collaborative and leads to uncoordinated design.

  When the world of graphic design meets development, designers were often confused about why mockups are not followed, why colors are not the same, not the same shapes, etc. All the while, developers ask designers why they can’t provide something that more closely resembles the system they aim to change. It’s uncoordinated work entering a highly-systemized world.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ DuckDuckGo Donates $25,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation v2025

    While TPRF never takes continued support for granted, when it does arrive, it allows the foundation to plan for the future with much greater confidence. Multi-year partnerships with our sponsors allow us to continue to prioritize important work, knowing that we will have the runway that we need to fund the work which helps to sustain the Perl Language and its associated communities.

• Python

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Winning a bet about “six”, the Python 2 compatibility shim

    Exactly five years ago today Andrey Petrov and I made a bet about whether “six”, the compatibility shim for Python 2 and 3 APIs, would still be in the top 20 daily downloads on PyPI. I said it would, Andrey took the side against.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • David A Wheeler ☛ Shellshock

    A related point is that data and code should be separated to the extent possible, and not conflated. Some would say that this is basically the same as separating namespaces, but for emphasis I will list this as a separate related point. This is not always practical, but it is worth considering as a starting point (and giving up only as necessary).

    This point is somewhat subtle. In a broader sense, all code is data. Data and code are typically stored on the same storage media and processed in the same memory. Compilers (including Just-in-Time compilers) would not work if data and code were always rigorously separated. Yet maintaining a distinction can significantly improve security.