Items tagged programming in 2024
Filters: Year: 2024 × programming × Sorted by date
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
— Nathaniel Borenstein # 8th May 2024, 8:24 pm
It’s hard to overstate the value of LLM support when coding for fun in an unfamiliar language. [...] This example is totally trivial in hindsight, but might have taken me a couple mins to figure out otherwise. This is a bigger deal than it seems! Papercuts add up fast and prevent flow. (A lot of being a senior engineer is just being proficient enough to avoid papercuts).
— Geoffrey Litt # 18th March 2024, 6:16 pm
scriptisto (via) This is really clever. “scriptisto is tool to enable writing one file scripts in languages that require compilation, dependencies fetching or preprocessing.”
You start your file with a “#!/usr/bin/env scriptisto” shebang line, then drop in a specially formatted block that tells it which compiler (if any) to use and how to build the tool. The rest of the file can then be written in any of the dozen-plus included languages... or you can create your own template to support something else.
The end result is you can now write a one-off tool in pretty much anything and have it execute as if it was a single built executable. # 6th February 2024, 4:49 am
Find a level of abstraction that works for what you need to do. When you have trouble there, look beneath that abstraction. You won’t be seeing how things really work, you’ll be seeing a lower-level abstraction that could be helpful. Sometimes what you need will be an abstraction one level up. Is your Python loop too slow? Perhaps you need a C loop. Or perhaps you need numpy array operations.
You (probably) don’t need to learn C.
— Ned Batchelder # 24th January 2024, 6:25 pm