Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 05, 2025

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Notes from Andreas Fredriksson’s “Context is Everything”

  I quite enjoyed this talk. Some of the technical details went over my head (I don’t know what “split 16-bit mask into two 8-bit LTUs” means) but I could still follow the underlying point.

• Dave Gauer ☛ Small Programs and Languages

  My Implementing a Forth article got some great feedback, particularly around the subject of tiny Forth implementations. (And it was an excuse to list some of the tiniest Forths I’ve seen.)

  I know I’m not alone in seeing the appeal of tiny Forths, tiny languages, tiny programs, and just small stuff in general. What’s up with that, anyway?

• Leon Mika ☛ Encapsulation In Software Development Is Underrated

  There is much to complain about the object-oriented approach to software development: how it tends to result in big systems, that it favours over-engineering, etc. But one principle I think OO gets right is encapsulation: the idea of coming up with a domain model, exposing the operations as methods, and completely hiding how these operations are implemented.

• Patricia Aas ☛ Why GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

  This particular pattern is so common in programming that we generally don’t think much about it. It has been present in programming for at least half a century. It is present as a core feature of the Unix/Linux command line. It’s basically that what I produce as output can be someone else’s input. Which means you can line us up and one program/function/whatever can take something, do something to it, and hand the result off.

• Rlang ☛ Understanding Basis Spline (B-spline) By Working Through Cox-deBoor Algorithm

  I finally understood B-splines by working through the Cox-deBoor algorithm step-by-step, discovering they’re just weighted combinations of basis functions that make non-linear regression linear.

• Alley Chaggar: Compiler Knowledge

  Intro

  I apologize that I’m a little late updating my blog, but over the past two weeks, I’ve been diving into Vala’s compiler and exploring how JSON (de)serialization could be integrated. My mentor, Lorenz, and I agreed that focusing on JSON is a good beginning.

• Red Hat ☛ Advanced time manipulation with GDB

  In a previous article, Using GDB to time travel, I explained the basics of time travel with GNU Debugger (GDB) and how you can go back to see the past. However, as all fans of time travel media know, merely seeing the past is just the surface of what you can do. 

  In this article, we'll discuss more interesting things you can do, such as creating time loops and changing the past without paradoxes. I won’t explain new commands this time, but I will put a few of them together in new and exciting ways.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ SlapbirdAPM, a Free and Open-Source Observability Tool for Perl Web Applications

    SlapbirdAPM is a free-software observability platform tailor made for Perl web-applications. [ It is also a Perl web-application :^) ] It has first class support for Plack, Mojo, Dancer2, and CGI. Slapbird provides developers with comprehensive observability tools to monitor and optimize their applications’ performance.

• Python

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Quickpost: emldump Bulk Extraction

    A reader asked about bulk extraction of email attachments with emldump.py

    If you want to extract all attachments and write them to disk, you can use the following command: [...]

  • University of Toronto ☛ Python type checkers work in different ways and can check different things

    For all of the time so far that I've been poking at Python's type checking, I've known that there was more than one program for type checking but I've basically ignored that and used mypy. My understanding was that mypy was the first Python type checker and the only fully community-based one, with the other type checkers the product of corporations and sometimes at least partially tied to things like Microsoft's efforts to get everyone hooked on VSCode, and I assumed that the type checkers mostly differed in things like speed and what they integrated with. Recently, I read Pyrefly vs. ty: Comparing Python’s Two New Rust-Based Type Checkers (via) and discovered that I was wrong about this, and at least some Python type checkers work quite differently from mypy in ways that matter to me.

  • Sumana Harihareswara ☛ Congratulating Leonard for his Community Service Award

    Twenty-one years ago, Leonard Richardson created the now-popular open source tool Beautiful Soup. He's maintained it ever since. In 2024, the Python Software Foundation recognized his contributions with two service awards, naming him a PSF Fellow and honoring him with a Community Service Award.

• Rust

  • Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 602

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