Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 05, 2026

• Sandor Dargo ☛ C++ Concepts is now a Leanpub course

  When I published C++ Concepts as a book back in 2022, I was happy with how it turned out. It covered the right material at the right depth, and the feedback from readers was positive. But a book is a passive experience — you read, you nod, you move on. I recently learned about Leanpub courses and I thought that it’s time to try something new.

  So I turned C++ Concepts it into a Leanpub course.

• Philip Zucker ☛ Validating GDB Interrupt Traces Against a TLA+ Spec

  Anyhoo, an angle that I’ve been trying recently is validating a high level TLA+ spec against as close to the actual system as possible, in particular fuzzing interrupt behavior using GDB and outputting high level trace events. GDB (and it’s python scripting api) is quite a nice universal interface for these purposes and allows me to actually run on the hardware via openocd. It quite a bit more likely one has an operating GDB setup compared to a formal spec of the hardware in question.

• Daphne Preston-Kendal ☛ crumbles.blog: WTF is going on with R7RS Large? 2026 edition

  Do come in and sit down. Pour yourself a cup of tea – I’ve just made a fresh pot.

  It’s been quite a ride since we last met to talk about these things. I became Scheme chair, but I’m not any more. Indeed, I’ve had to quit Scheme entirely. Let me tell you how this happened.

  Obviously, I’m a lot more personally (and emotionally) invested in telling the story this time than I was last time. It should go without saying that, like last time, this is my own view on what happened.

• JYN ☛ simple is not small

  I hope this post encourages you to write programs that are simple, not small, and to look for tools that you use that are unnecessarily coupled.

  In a future post, I hope to extend these ideas: how to develop your sense of taste; how programs can be vertically integrated while still being decoupled; and how to build large systems without making them complex.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: #059: r2u, Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub Actions, a Tragedy of the Commons, and a Fix

  Welcome to post 59 in the R⁴ series.

  How did we get here: A initial words about Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub . GitHub Actions provides (essentially unlimited) compute time. This further boosts a service already in a market-dominating position: GitHub¹ as a code repository. Those of us old enough to remember the start of git (the program and protocol) may remember the extremely bare-bones initial hosting site repo.or.cz (launched in 2006). Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub came two years later, and put an enormous amount of focus into design and user interfaces. To cut a long story short, Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub won the services war. And with it git won the platform war. To a first approximation, everybody and everything is on Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub .>² So the repository is already dominant.³ And then free compute was added.

• Perl / Raku

  • Olaf Alders ☛ CPAN Uploads Are Up 50% Year-over-Year [Ed: Perl is like irc://. Even if not so many people use it, the very age and the longevity of it gives some sign of the low probability it'll just go away. iophk: Perl is also so very useful both regex and its very syntax, unfortunately for *some* who have no skill or discipline the syntax is flexible enough to make challenging to read code. Microsoft amplified that message for decades, but more accurately it is a Rorscharch Test of sorts Anyway, IMHO no other scripting languages are as quick to write, fun to write, flexible, and powerful. Some may excel at one or two of those characteristics but only Perl at all four.]

    Wondering what impact LLMs are having on the CPAN ecosystem: a month over month comparison of Jan-Aug 2026 against 2025. By all of these measures, CPAN looks to be a healthier and more vibrant ecosystem.

• Python

  • Linux.org ☛ Python Series Part 25: Canvas Widget - Part 2

    If you read the previous article, you should understand the Canvas Widget.
    In this article, we will start with the different methods that are available to manipulate the objects on the Canvas.
    Canvas Methods