Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 18, 2025

Stanford University ☛ C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup reimagines how coding is taught

In his Thursday talk, Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language, emphasized the need for three different types of introductory computer science classes.

• Hackaday ☛ Porting COBOL Code And The Trouble With Ditching Domain Specific Languages

  Whenever the topic is raised in popular media about porting a codebase written in an ‘antiquated’ programming language like Fortran or COBOL, very few people tend to object to this notion. After all, what could be better than ditching decades of crusty old code in a language that only your grandparents can remember as being relevant? Surely a clean and fresh rewrite in a modern language like Java, Rust, Python, Zig, or NodeJS will fix all ailments and make future maintenance a snap?

• [Old] Dylan Beattie ☛ The Problem with “Vibe Coding”

  Probably the single most important lesson I’ve learned in my career, the thing that I would argue is the hallmark of “experience”, is understanding just how much work it takes to turn a working program into a viable product. It’s why developer estimates are so notoriously optimistic - and why experienced developers are so notoriously cynical. Let’s say you crank out a bit of code that’ll take responses from a web form and add them in an Excel spreadsheet. That’s not that hard… yay! we just built a Typeform competitor in one afternoon! Except, no, you didn’t. You made one thing work one time on one computer. You haven’t considered encoding, internationalization, concurrency, authentication, telemetry, billing, branding, mobile devices, deployment. You haven’t hit any of the weird limits yet - ever had a system work brilliantly for the first 65,535 requests and then fall over? You don’t have a product. At best, you have a proof-of-concept of a good idea that, if some very smart people work very hard, might become a viable product.

• Modus Create LLC ☛ Frontend live-coding via ghci

  I was confident this could be done with moderate effort. Almost all the pieces are already in place: the external interpreter logic in GHC is there, and the wasm dynamic linker already works in nodejs. So just make it runnable in browsers as well, add a bit of logic for communicating with GHC and we’re done right? Well, it still took a few months for me to land it…but finally here it is!

  To keep this post within reasonable length, I will only introduce the user-facing aspects of the wasm ghci browser mode and won’t cover the underlying implementation. The rest of the post is an example ghci session followed by a series of bite sized subsections, each covering one important tip about using this feature.

• Caleb Hearth ☛ Tally All Git Trailers in a Repository

  I’ve been using a lot of Git Trailers in my commit messages recently and as my thinking on which trailer keys to use has evolved, it’s been useful to look back at which ones have been used before.

• Security Week ☛ Critical Erlang/OTP SSH Flaw Exposes Many Devices to Remote Hacking

  Erlang/OTP is a collection of libraries, middleware and other tools designed for creating scalable soft real-time systems that require high availability, such as e-commerce, banking, and communications applications.

  A team of researchers from Ruhr University Bochum in Germany discovered that Erlang/OTP’s SSH implementation is affected by a critical vulnerability for which they calculated a CVSS score of 10.

• Andy Bell ☛ How to write error messages that actually help users rather than frustrate them

  The first step in planning and creating good error messages is to identify the different types of errors that could occur within our user experience. For example: [...]

• Julia Programming Language ☛ JuliaHub Audit Features for Pharmacometrics Software Records

  In the dynamic realm of scientific computing and data analysis, the importance of maintaining the integrity of every artifact and computational process cannot be overstated. Meticulous tracking and documentation of every action on data and code are crucial for valid research and regulatory compliance. JuliaHub provides robust audit trail and traceability features to meet these demands.

• Python

  • How to Convert Parquet to JSON in Python – Step by Step

    While working with an extensive set of data (big data), you might have encountered Parquet files—those columnar storage format files that data engineers love. However, there are pretty much chances you need to share that data with applications or systems that prefer JSON format.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Own HowTo ☛ Make a file executable via a bash script

    In this tutorial, you will learn how to write a simple bash script that can help you to make files executable automatically without having to enter the chmod command manually.

    Making a bash script executable is quite easy, however instead of using the chmod +x command, you can use this