Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 10, 2025

• Sandor Dargo ☛ Should you use final?

  Today, let’s discuss a bit about the not too frequently used final specicfier. I think there is not a lot of reason to use which is supported by the core guidelines. But even when you’d use it, probably you should not.

  Today, let’s discuss the not-too-frequently-used final specifier. I think there aren’t many good reasons to use it — something the C++ Core Guidelines also suggests. And even when you could use it, you probably shouldn’t.

• Ted Unangst ☛ what if the poison were rust?

  The OpenBSD kernel has a set of functions to help detect memory corruption, the poison subroutines. The memory management code uses these functions, but they themselves have a very simple interface, no complicated types or data structures, meaning they’re easy to replace. What if we rewrite the memory corruption detection functions in rust so it’s impossible for them to cause memory corruption?

• Teiva Harsanyi ☛ Functors, Applicatives, and Monads: Unboxing Functional Programming Concepts

  Hello! Today, we will explore functional programming with the concepts of functors, applicatives, and monads. We will discuss what they are and why they matter one step at a time. Note that all the examples will be in Haskell, but you’re not required to know Haskell to read this post.

• Tom Szilagyi ☛ The Barium Experiment

  And let’s also consider for a moment the web application, that mythical beast which is such a royal pain to deal with, yet is somehow still hailed as transcending the problems of the “traditional” desktop GUI. Well, it transcends and replaces those with other problems that can only be fixed in the next version of the framework, or if that fails, the next completely new framework. If it hurts, you can always buy a bigger, fatter computer. Or hire yet another Scrum Master. Or just live with it (everything is broken anyway).

  If you managed to stay in this industry for 20 years, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and here’s a tip of my hat to you.

• Rlang ☛ Shiny in Production 2024 Videos

  Considering a ticket for Shiny in Production 2025 but unsure what to expect? Maybe you attended in past years but missed out in 2024, or you simply want a refresher on last year’s highlights. Whatever the case, the video player below has you covered!

• Rlang ☛ Extending the Theta forecasting method to GLMs and attention

  Python and R examples of use of the Theta model for GLMs and attention (context)

• Ben Congdon ☛ Why Developer Tools?

  I had the realization a year or so ago that much of the high-impact work I’ve done in my career has been related – directly or indirectly – to building developer tooling. I did not plan this, at all, but I’m quite happy to have found impact in this niche.

  My first job outside of school was writing a developer tool for engineers building the Google Cloud Console, which is the frontend for GCP and (at least at the time) was likely the largest Angular app in existence¹. The team I joined has been recently created and was building a set of tools to replace some hilariously unergonomic tools that had organically grown along with the problem space.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: AsioHeaders 1.28.2-1 on CRAN: New Upstream

  A new release of the AsioHeaders package arrived at CRAN earlier today. Asio provides a cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming. It is also included in Boost – but requires linking when used as part of Boost.

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Subcircular with Raku

    You are given a list of words.

    Write a script to find out whether the last character of each word is the first character of the following word.

• Python

  • Packaging Python Command-Line Apps the Modern Way with uv

    In this article, I explore how to use uv to build and package Python command-line applications effectively. I demonstrate the step-by-step process of setting up a project, initializing a new CLI app, and managing dependencies with uv, all while using a dictionary API as an example. The focus is on building a professional-grade application that can be distributed as a Python wheel for easy installation via local sharing, PyPI, or Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub .

  • SusamPal ☛ Elliptical Python Programming

    One thing I love about Python is how it comes with its very own built-in zen. In moments of tribulations, when the code is broken and thoughts are tangled, I often find solace in its timeless wisdom. Here's a glimpse of the clarity it provides: [...]

  • Doug Turnbull ☛ An LLM Query Understanding Service

    The code below is just a dummy “hello world” app talking to an LLM. We send a chat message over JSON, the LLM comes up with a response and we send it back.

    Here’s the basic service: [...]

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Michał Sapka ☛ Fun Unix Fact: There are no cats in your terminal

    We all know their use: to display given parts of documents. But do you know that none of them refers to animals?

• Frank Delporte ☛ Defining the Text in a JavaFX ComboBox with Objects

  Do you know the problem that you have done a specific task already many times in the past, but it’s too long ago to remember exactly how you did it the previous times? One of those cases for me, is how you create a JavaFX ComboBox and configure it to show a specific field of an object in the opened and closed state of the ComboBox.

  So to fix the problem, I documented it here in a blog post, and hope I remember that I blogged about it, the next time I need this functionality ;-)

• Teiva Harsanyi ☛ So, I Wrote a Book: The Story Behind 100 Go Mistakes

  After four months in this new company, I noticed that some of my colleagues were making the same mistakes I made when I was working in Switzerland.

  So, I decided to write a blog post listing common mistakes in Go called The Top 10 Most Common Mistakes I’ve Seen in Go Projects.

• Rust

  • Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 594

    Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!