Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 13, 2026

• [Old] University of Michigan ☛ The Icon Programming Language: Hello world!

  This program demonstrates the text output function of the Icon programming language by displaying the message "Hello world!".

• Michael Kohl ☛ C-like bit flags in Ruby

  I recently needed some C-like bit flags in Ruby. There’s the bit_flag gem for this, but I didn’t particularly like its API. I also don’t think such a small feature justifies taking on a dependency. So I decided to roll my own. This is how it works: [...]

• Eli Bendersky ☛ Monads in Lean website

  This post demonstrates how to use monads in the Lean programming language (Lean 4, to be specific). If you're not familiar with Lean, this part of the language is very similar to other functional programming languages, like Haskell or OCaml.

• Connor Tumbleson ☛ Black October 2026

  It's tough to understand the scale of this without really understanding how technology works under the hood. We can roughly summarize it all by saying the world runs on trust. We trust companies to keep things secure so our traffic can be encrypted properly. Instead of a certificate having a private key backed by a number hundreds of digits in length this time roughly 30,000 certificates were backed by the number that could be broken in seconds on any computer.

• Ben Congdon ☛ Herdr and the Meta-harness

  I see a lot of discussion around “TUI vs. GUI” for coding agents. This discussion is often of the form: “the more I use Claude Code/Codex/Pi, the more I’ve outgrown the TUI and want to use a GUI app”.

• MJ Fransen ☛ Elisp to save page from EWW in Readeck

  Elisp to save page from EWW in Readeck

  RSS feed reader and a read-it-later application combination

  Using a RSS feed reader sets you in control of what info you see, instead of some evil algorithm.

  The combination of a RSS feed reader with a good read-it-later application is a wonderful solution to consume information from the internet.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • [Old] HowTo Geek ☛ How Kali Linux's Zsh setup turned me into a terminal fan

    After using Bash for years on Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint, when I first came across Zsh on Kali Linux, it was like a new world just opened in front of me. Syntax highlighting, command suggestions, and all the gorgeous colors made me rethink my decision to ignore the command line. I had plenty of reasons to replace Bash with Zsh.

    The second shock came when I learned I could extend Zsh even further, using a framework called Oh My Zsh. Together with Zsh and Oh My Zsh, I knew that I was in for a treat in the terminal.

  • [Old] Carlos Neto ☛ Hacking Your Zsh Terminal with Custom Widgets

    This blog post explains how to create custom Zsh widgets: shell functions bound to keyboard shortcuts through the Zsh Line Editor (ZLE). It’s the Zsh version of Hacking Your Bash Terminal with Custom Widgets, and it ends with the same widget that reruns the current command every two seconds.

  • ComputingForGeeks ☛ Install Oh My Zsh on macOS: Plugins, Fonts, Speed | ComputingForGeeks

    Apple made zsh the default for new accounts in macOS 10.15, and every release since ships it at /bin/zsh. Accounts that were created on Mojave or earlier and carried through upgrades can still be on bash, so check before you install anything on top. $SHELL reflects the login shell in your user record, and dscl reads that record directly: [...]

  • Ucartz Online Pvt Ltd ☛ How to Install and Use the Fish Shell on Ubuntu - Ucartz

    fish (the friendly interactive shell) is an alternative to bash for working at the command line. It suggests commands from your history as you type, colours commands as valid or invalid, and completes commands, options and file names with Tab, with almost no setup. We ran every command below in Ubuntu 24.04.5 and 26.04.1 test containers.

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code 2026 results

    The Rust Project participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the third time this year. This time we had 13 projects, and our dear contributors have been working very hard on them for several months. As usual, the projects had various durations, so while some of them have ended in August, the last one has only finished in November, so we have been waiting until we have all the results before publishing this blog post.

• Standards/Consortia

  • For the first time, a C++ standard failed to pass the national bodies | MOND←TECH MAGAZINE

    tl;dr: WG21 voted to include Contracts in C++26. Several high-ranking members of WG21 are strongly opposed to Contracts, and so are several national bodies. The national body vote was the ’last resort’ place to prevent Contracts from being canonicalized as part of the C++ standard.

    ▶ Wait, that’s too fast for me, what are Contracts?