Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 29, 2025

• Dayvi Schuster ☛ Worse is Better Start Simple and Iterate

  I hold myself to a standard of simplicity and clarity, and strive for perfection in my work. I write stuff clean (not clean code TM), I document my work, I write tests, and I follow good practices and patterns(not always to a T). But I never ship the original version of my work to perfection. Not from laziness but conviction. Perfectionism isn’t rigor, it’s cowardice. Cowardice that your code might be seen and dismissed. Good enough isn’t good enough, not really. You still hone your craft, still cut the wood true. But you don’t carve every possible notch for problems you haven’t seen before you raise the rafters. Ship what stands strong, iterate when the storms show where it leaks. Because trying to predict every crack before it appears is just paralysis with a blueprint.

• Spidermonkey Development Blog: Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?

  We recently overhauled our internal tools for visualizing the compilation of JavaScript and WebAssembly. When SpiderMonkey’s optimizing compiler, Ion, is active, we can now produce interactive graphs showing exactly how functions are processed and optimized.

• Hackaday ☛ Web Development In… Pascal?

  If you were asked to make an e-commerce website in 2025, what language would you reach for? Show of hands: JavaScript? Go? Pascal? Well, there was at least one taker for that last one: [jns], and he has an hour-long tutorial video showing you how he made it happen. 

• Sam Saffron ☛ Your vibe coded slop PR is not welcome

  The core issue: AI tools have made code generation cheap, but they haven’t made code review cheap. Every incomplete PR consumes maintainer attention that could go toward ready-to-merge contributions.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: #054: Faster r-ci Continuous Integration via r2u Container

  Welcome to post 54 in the R⁴ series.

• Rlang ☛ September 2025 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

  fastfocal v0.1.3: Provides a fast moving-window (“focal”) and buffer-based extraction for raster data using the terra package.

• Rlang ☛ GSS Release

• Perl / Raku

  • HowTo Geek ☛ 6 Perl One-Liners to Replace Common Linux Utilities

    While other scripting languages have gained popularity, Perl remains a popular choice due to its robust text processing capabilities. It's easy to create "one-liners," or very short scripts, that can even replace standalone Unix utilities. Here are some tools you can create right from the command line.

    Regex Matching to Replace grep

    grep is one of the most useful tools in Linux to examine output. It searches text using regular expressions, a precise language that allows you to specify matches down to the character level. Perl is known for its regular expression matching abilities, so much so that a lot of other utilities and programming languages advertise "Perl-compatible" regular expressions.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Thomas Rigby ☛ jrnl

    These files are just markdown files kept on our shared server at work. I can access them through a browser or through any text editing software that can open files on that server.

    It's boringly simple.

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Project goals for 2025H2

    On Sep 9, we merged RFC 3849, declaring our goals for the "second half" of 2025H2 -- well, the last 3 months, at least, since "yours truly" ran a bit behind getting the goals program organized.

  • The New Stack ☛ Why Sudo-rs Brings Modern Memory Safety to Ubuntu 26.04

    First things, first. Chill out. Yes, Ubuntu 26.04, the next long-term support of Ubuntu, will have sudo-rs, a version of sudo written in memory-safe Rust. No, it’s not going to replace good-old C-based sudo. They’ll both be in there. Breathe. Relax.