Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 04, 2026

DJ Adams ☛ Genres, cuids and a bit of AWK

One of my goals this year is to learn more about the AWK programming language. I'm interested in not only the beauty of the language itself and the Unix history that surrounded it, but in how AWK shaped one of my favourite languages of all time, Perl.

In some ways AWK and CAP are similar, in that there's beauty, power and simplicity built in. These three attributes come about not least because it's about the code that you don't have to write; the language (AWK) and the framework (CAP) take care of much of the ceremony, allowing you to focus on the heart of the task at hand, and to write the smallest amount of code necessary to get the job done and minimise the maintenance burden for yourself.

• Ben Werdmuller ☛ Can we build the dog?

  While most of these questions consider up-front issues, this section describes the ongoing overhead for a team. This represents risk: time a team spends working on maintaining an existing tool is time it can’t spend building anything new or maintaining other tools. Over time, without careful lifecycle management and brutal decision-making, a team’s bandwidth can disappear into ongoing maintenance.

• Linux Matters: The Smell of Git

  Mark explains the links between GNU/Linux and North Hampshire, Alan spring cleans hit Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub profile, and Martin gets busy with lazy git.

• Mark Seeman ☛ In defence of correctness

  People make business decisions based on reports, implicitly assuming that reports are correct. If you count something double, or conversely accidentally discard data, business decisions will be based on incorrect data. This affects the real world. In this particularly case, the data was used to budget the number of people who it was possible to accept into a particular programme. If you count wrong, you may either turn away too many people, or conversely accept too many, which will impact your ability to deliver your services in the future.

  And to be clear: These kinds of errors are difficult to spot. The system isn't crashing or throwing exceptions. It just calculates wrong numbers. It is incorrect.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Why did I create ESR (my thoughts on ESS)

    A few years later I started my PhD and decided that this was too archaic. For some reason I wanted to keep away from Rstudio and started searching for a good text editor for R. I was surprised to find that there are a lot of good options. But I had a plan: I decided to try a few to see how I feel with each and then choose. I made a list of 3 or 4 and started with the first one. It was Emacs with ESS. I never made it to the 2nd one.

    From the very beginning, Emacs felt very natural and intuitive to me. I guess that its structure and way of working fits my mindset. I adopted ESS in the same way, simply as part of my Emacs experience. I learned the basic key bindings, the connection to the R console and a few shortcuts for package development and plots. In no time I had a great working environment for R. It was the falling in love phase and I just loved all of it.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Linux Shell Scripting Interview Questions & Answers 2026

    Most people think shell scripting is for hardcore programmers — the caffeinated ones who talk about kernels at parties. Here is the truth nobody tells beginners: shell scripting is not programming. Shell scripting is telling your computer to stop bothering you.