Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 20, 2025

• Yilei Yang ☛ New Open Source Package: SwiftTitleCase

  I just released a new open source package, SwiftTitleCase. This package contains a Swift function that tries its best to transform strings to AP style title case.

• Terence Eden ☛ Introducing Pretty Print HTML for PHP 8.4

  I'm delight to announce the first release of my opinionated HTML Pretty Printer for new versions of PHP.

• Chris Wellons ☛ WebAssembly: How to allocate your allocator

  An early, small hurdle diving into WebAssembly was allocating my allocator. On a server or desktop with virtual memory, the allocator asks the operating system to map fresh pages into its address space (sbrk, anonymous mmap, VirtualAlloc), which it then dynamically allocates to different purposes. In an embedded context, dynamic allocation memory is typically a fixed, static region chosen at link time. The WASM execution environment more resembles an embedded system, but both kinds of obtaining raw memory are viable and useful in different situations.

• Ben Kuhn ☛ Impact, agency, and taste

  I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart my coworkers who’ve done the best work.

  You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that’s true. Among my Anthropic coworkers, though, we’ve restricted the range by screening for extremely high-percentile technical ability, so the remaining differences, while they still matter, aren’t quite as critical. Instead, people’s biggest bottleneck eventually becomes their ability to get leverage—i.e., to find and execute work that has a big impact-per-hour multiplier.

• Alex Petros ☛ The Mostly True Naming Rule

  And these are all relatively similar programming languages. Naming conventions start to diverge wildly when you start talking about languages like SQL, HTML, or COBOL.

  Reasonable people understand that these rules are more what you’d call guidelines, and that being consistent in your conventions is generally the most important thing. I do have a naming rule that I like, though, one which is mostly applicable everywhere.

• Matt Kline ☛ Concurrency in Haskell: Fast, Simple, Correct

  After nearly a decade of building embedded systems in C, C++, and Rust, I’ve somehow ended up writing Haskell for a living. If you’d asked me about functional programming a few years ago, I would have told you it was self-indulgent academic baloney—and then I stumbled into people using it for real-time systems where microseconds can mean literal life or death.

  I’m too old to try to convince people what tools they should use, but Haskell has some features that might interest anyone who cares about fast, correct code. Let’s talk about them.

  We’ll start with concurrency.

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Friendly Acronyms with Raku

    You are given an array of words and a word.

    Write a script to return true if concatenating the first letter of each word in the given array matches the given word, return false otherwise.

• Java

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install GlassFish Application Server with Nginx Reverse Proxy on Debian 12

    GlassFish is a free and open-source implementation of the Java EE Platform developed by Eclipse. It's the world's first implementation of the Java EE platform provides a lightweight application server and allows you to deploy multiple Java-based applications. GlassFish supports multiple types of Java-application technologies such as Enterprise JavaBeans, JPA, JavaServer Faces, JMS, and many more.

    GlassFish is one of the best choices for developers to develop and deploy Java-based applications. It allows developers to develop enterprise applications in a convenient way and also scalable architecture. The GlasshFish project was originally started by Sun Microsystem. It comes with two different free Licenses - The Common Development and Distribution License and the GNU General Public License.