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Programming Leftovers
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[Old] Thalia Archibald ☛ Curly braces: An evolution of UNIX and C
How were { } curly braces typed with a Teletype Model 33 on UNIX? These characters are especially important for C, but absent on this terminal. I was just asked a similar question 1 and in response, this is a tour of the coevolution of UNIX and C, from this perspective, featuring “hello, world” through the ages.
This work is entirely my own (no AI) and the code samples are my construction. Sources for all inferences are cited.
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Tymscar ☛ How To Report A Bug So It Actually Gets Fixed
I wanted to make a blog post like this for a long time, because it’s something that I wish I could find more of myself. I think one of the things that helps us most in our careers as software engineers is knowing how to debug problems, how to reproduce them, and how to report them.
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Ned Batchelder ☛ Micro language implementation: Calcium
I wrote a tiny language implementation: Calcium. It’s meant as a demonstration of how languages like Python are implemented. It has a tokenizer, a parser, an AST, a compiler, bytecodes, and an execution engine, all in about 300 lines of code.
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Jamie Tanna ☛ What commit did I branch off from?
Sometimes, you create a branch off another branch, do some work on it, and want to know what the original branch was pointing at.
For instance, if you're looking to clean up your Git history, but don't want to rebase off origin/HEAD as you know there are some gnarly conflicts you may have to deal with, you want to know the last known "good" commit.
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Perl / Raku
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Perl ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Pacman in Perl/Tk
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Arne Sommer ☛ String the Atoms with Raku
This is my response to The Weekly Challenge #387.
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Java/Golang
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Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Security Baked Into the JVM: sixteen Subjects on the wire
Alice calls the order service. The order service calls the ledger on her behalf. At the second hop, the ledger has to decide whose authority the debit is being made under. Most stacks answer badly. Forward Alice’s bearer token verbatim, and the ledger cannot tell her from the service that relayed it. Drop the token and the ledger sees a machine, with no record that a human started the chain. Neither option lets the ledger authorize the combination.
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Standards/Consortia
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Terence Eden ☛ Death to px, long live ch!
Pixels are a lie. Even if you think you're drawing something with "pixel perfect" accuracy, your monitor is lying to you. There is no grid of platonically perfect squares.
In CSS, pixels are a double lie: [...]
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