Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 22, 2026

• Josh Lospinoso ☛ The Model Wants to Exist

  A race-video stroke trace from the King Kamehameha Regatta opens an inquiry into why some observations seem to demand models and what changes once the instrument gets a vote.

• Henri Bergius ☛ Development dependencies considered harmful

  Time is a precious resource for open source maintainers, especially if you aren’t doing it as part of paid work. The constant churn of changing development tools steals a huge chunk of that time.

  For example, I’m running NoFlo on a daily basis, but do changes to the library itself quite rarely. There were nearly six years between releases recently.

  The other day I wanted to add some functionality, and ran immediately to a huge set of issues with the development tooling we use. Basically everything we rely on is deprecated and has a huge set of security issues. Just to show some: [...]

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ This Week in Package Management: 20 June 2026

  Week five of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon.

• Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Programming languages, targets, and platforms

  I started as a Java developer, but for some time now, I have broadened my horizons. Recently, I thought about how early languages were dedicated to a single target and platform, and now they are broadening their focus. In this post, I want to write down my thoughts in the hope that it may be useful to others, probably to my future self.

• Marius Bancila ☛ Improvements to std::format in C++26

  The C++26 standard features a series of improvements to the format library. In this article, we will look at the most important of them.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 15.4.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream Minor

  integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1282 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 47.1 million / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 697 times according

  This versions updates to the 15.4.0 upstream Armadillo release made on Thursday. We had run a complete reverse-dependency check leading up to it, asserting there were no issues with packages dependent on it. As it sometimes goes with that many packages involved, one CRAN package reported one test failure. And it turned out to be both unrelated and pre-existing. But sorting this out over one round of email delayed things by a day. And then I went cycling for a good cause so this announcement post comes a little later than usual. The package has also been updated for Debian, built for r2u, and by now also at CRAN for the different binary releases.

• Henri Bergius ☛ Development dependencies considered harmful

  Time is a precious resource for open source maintainers, especially if you aren’t doing it as part of paid work. The constant churn of changing development tools steals a huge chunk of that time.

  For example, I’m running NoFlo on a daily basis, but do changes to the library itself quite rarely. There were nearly six years between releases recently.

  The other day I wanted to add some functionality, and ran immediately to a huge set of issues with the development tooling we use. Basically everything we rely on is deprecated and has a huge set of security issues. Just to show some: [...]

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ GTC 2.20 Pro designer

    Let's start with an overview: a new color set creator named analogous arrived and 7 new color calculators (designer API). The method complement got extended and works now in any color space of the HSL family, not just HSL. The 3 new color spaces are OKHSL, OKHSV and OKHWB, which also allow for better defaults and prepare one big upcoming feature. Lots of fine tuning happened to make the API more consistent and the error handling on the user facing side can now be configured. And the greatest effort was a complete rewrite and restructuring of the documentation.

• Java/Golang

  • Redowan Delowar ☛ Channel iteration and goroutine leak

    I ran into the classic “range over a channel” leak while working on a custom cron scheduler. I’ve debugged it on prod many times before, but writing one myself in a small piece of code reminded me how easy it is to write bugs like this even when you know about it.

    Here: [...]