news
Programming Leftovers
-
Perl / Raku
-
Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2026.09 Release #190 (2026.02)
The following people contributed to this release: Will Coleda, Elizabeth Mattijsen, librasteve, David Simon Schultz, Eric Forste, Justin DeVuyst, Patrick Böker, Coleman McFarland, Daniel Green, Márton Polgár, 2colours, 4zv4l Forthcoming German Perl/Raku Workshop 28th German Perl/Raku Workshop (16th-18th March 2026 in Berlin)
-
-
R / R-Script
-
Rlang ☛ How to Fit Hierarchical Bayesian Models in R with brms: Partial Pooling Explained
Hierarchical Bayesian modeling (also called multilevel modeling) is one of the most reliable ways to build predictive and inferential models when your data has natural grouping—teams, players, seasons, leagues, referees, venues, or even game states. In sports analytics, that grouping is unavoidable. In R, hierarchical Bayesian models are commonly implemented via brms (Stan), rstanarm, or cmdstanr.
This tutorial focuses on partial pooling (a.k.a. shrinkage) and why it’s the default choice for academic, production-grade modeling: it reduces overfitting, improves out-of-sample performance, and produces honest uncertainty quantification. We will use a sports dataset as a concrete example, but the modeling principles generalize to many domains (education, marketing, medicine, A/B testing, and more).
-
Rlang ☛ January 2026 Top 40 New CRAN Packages
Two hundred forty-one of the new packages submitted to CRAN in January were still there in mid-February.
-
-
Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
-
University of Toronto ☛ The things that make me so attached to xterm as my terminal program
I've said before in various contexts (eg) that I'm very attached to the venerable xterm as my terminal (emulator) program, and I'm not looking forward to the day that I may have to migrate away from it due to Wayland (although I probably can keep running it under XWayland, now that I think about it). But I've never tried to write down a list of the things that make me so attached to it over other alternatives like urxvt, much less more standard ones like gnome-terminal. Today I'm going to try to do that, although my list is probably going to be incomplete.
-
-
Java/Golang
-
The Register UK ☛ Generic methods approved for Go, devs miss other features
Griesemer said that the new feature is fully backward-compatible with existing Go code, though tools will need to catch up. The interface issue remains, though, and Griesemer added that providing generic methods "doesn't preclude the implementation of generic interface methods at some point, should we find an acceptable implementation solution."
-
Frank Delporte ☛ Introducing Lottie4J, a Java(FX) Library to Parse and Play Lottie Animation Files
I’m proud to present a new JavaFX library: Lottie4J, that brings Lottie animations to JavaFX applications. I first learned about Lottie many years ago when we were developing a mobile app. We used Lottie animations to explain to users how to operate a physical device. The animations made the instructions so much clearer than static images or text alone.
-
-
Rust
-
Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: 2025 State of Rust Survey Results
Hello, Rust community!
Once again, the survey team is happy to share the results of the State of Rust survey, this year celebrating a round number - the 10th edition!
The survey ran for 30 days (from November 17th to December, 17th 2025) and collected 7156 responses, a slight decrease in responses compared to last year. In this blog post we will shine a light on some specific key findings. As usual, the full report is available for download.
-