Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 15, 2026

• Hackaday ☛ Rosy Retrocomputing

  Preprocessing one language to another is nothing new. RATFOR and RATFIV by Brian Kernighan converted modern constructs to conventional FORTRAN IV. Even C++ started out as a program that emitted C code.

  So the idea is good, but there are dozens of corner cases. As I anticipated having another go at the idea for BASIC, I realized my earlier versions had some design choices that made it harder than it should have been. So I started from scratch.

• Laurie Voss ☛ We are all Product Engineers now

  That led me off on a tangent that grew into this equally long post. I had a bunch of questions to answer. Has the cost of creating software really collapsed? Can I prove that? If the cost of actually producing code goes to zero, what parts of the job of “software developer” really remain? Where, in fact, is the entire industry of software going in the next decade?

• Anton Morrier ☛ Being lazy in C++

  Again, I haven’t posted in a long time. I suppose I’ll have to start all my new articles with this sentence, ahaha. I can say I was a bit lazy, and that’s a good thing because we’re going to see how to be lazy in C++.

  Lazy initialization is the practice of delaying initialization until it is needed. It can be used to optimize performance (which will be the subject of the next article), but it popped up when I was asked an interesting question a while ago while working for one of my clients.

• Ruby ☛ Ruby 4.0.7 Released

  Ruby 4.0.7 has been released.

  Please see the GitHub releases for further details.

  We intend to release the latest stable Ruby version (currently Ruby 4.0) every two months following the most recent release. Ruby 4.0.8 will be released in November.

  If a change arises that significantly affects users, a release may occur earlier than planned.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linuxize ☛ Fix "No Space Left on Device" When df Shows Free Space

    Fix GNU/Linux no-space errors when df shows free space by checking the target mount, inode usage, tmpfs limits, container storage, Btrfs, and inotify watches.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How I Deployed a Node.js App on a VPS (Git, SSL, PM2 and Monitoring)

    We deploy a Node.js app by creating a separate account within our VPS using Git, PM2, SSL, monitoring and we also make changes and restore backup.

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2026.36/7 Multiplicity

    Andrew Shitov keeps on writing good blog posts, highlighting Raku Programming Language features: and created new modules: CSV::Native, Prompt::Hidden and perhaps most interestingly GUI::Wings! Anton’s Corner Anton Antonov is looking for suggestions for Raku-centric Hey Hi (AI) Agent Skills! Weeklies Weekly Challenge #390 and #391 are available for your perusal.

• Python

  • Red Hat ☛ Python 3.14 free-threaded build is now available in RHEL

    Developers on Red Hat Enterprise GNU/Linux 9.8 and 10.2 can now test full parallel CPU execution in Python using the new free-threaded Python 3.14 build. In addition to the regular Python 3.14 interpreter, we also provide the free-threaded variant in the Red Bait CodeReady GNU/Linux Builder repositories.

    Python 3.14 is the first upstream release where the free-threaded build is officially supported rather than experimental.

  • Simon Späti ☛ The Grammar of Data: From Definition to Execution

    This Part 2 will demonstrate how this looks in a data engineering digest project where we process data from RSS feeds, a live Bluesky firehose, and GitHub datasets, and find trends with an all-integrated horizontal data architecture running xorq based on the grammar described.

    We use dlt for ingestion (outside the grammar), then Ibis, DataFusion/DuckDB/Snowflake for the engine, a cataloging feature to compress and discover metrics, and a small ML job. This article will guide you through that project and explain why xorq and the grammar of data are helpful to you.

  • Thierry Moudiki ☛ Model-agnostic prediction intervals in Python and R: does nnetsauce's QuantileRegressor hold up?

    The same class is available in R, via nnetsauce_r — and it’s worth noting up front that it isn’t a separate reimplementation. The R function is a thin reticulate wrapper that calls the identical Python object under the hood. There is no separate R implementation to audit; auditing the Python source is auditing the R behavior.

    Python (this is real, runnable code — see the cell below)

  • The Register UK ☛ CPython eases Rust requirements as assimilation continues

    The maintainers of CPython have backed off from making Rust a required dependency for the Python reference implementation, focusing on the less intrusive task of building an optional Rust API for internal Python development.

    The move “sidesteps a lot of the concerns that people brought up,” Rust Programming Manager Tomáš Šedovič explained at RustConf, held in Montréal last week. Šedovič and others from Rust have been working with the CPython core developers to smooth the integration between the two environments.

    CPython’s revised approach eschews a more aggressive push to use Rust in Python, an approach that roiled the Linux kernel community’s adoption of Rust last year.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Terminal border traversal animation powered by bash and raw escape codes.