I feel like better code visualization would solve a lot of my problems. Or at least highlight them.

The Code Review Pyramid

Let’s look at a recent paper by Xia, Bao, Lo, Xing, Hassan, & Li entitled Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals and published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 44, 951-976, 2018. This paper is quite interesting in that it describes in great details how the figures are obtained. And it says that Comprehension took on average ~58%.

The SE server is also responsible for building ebooks when they get released or updated. This is done using our ebook production command line toolset.

# Input Input: 123, Output: Input: 121, Output: Input: 111, Output: Input: 123454321, Output: Input 123123, Output: # Instruction Output true if input is a palindrome # Output Input: 123, Output: false Input: 121, Output: true Input: 111, Output: true Input: 123454321, Output: true Input 123123, Output: false

software will work only if we provide the tools to fix it when it goes wrong

Using named arguments is nice for languages that support it, but this is not always a possibility. Even in Python, where time.sleep is defined with a single argument named secs, we can’t call sleep(secs=300) due to implementation reasons. In that case, we can give the value a name instead.Instead of this:time.sleep(300)Do this:sleep_seconds = 300 time.sleep(sleep_seconds)Now the code is unambiguous, and readable without having to consult the documentation.

Core: like an engine in a car. The product is meaningless without it.Necessary: like a car’s spare wheel. It’s rarely used but when needed, its function decides the success of the system.Added value: like a car’s cup-holder. It’s nice to have but the product is perfectly usable without it.Unique Selling Point: the main reason people should buy your product instead of your rivals. For example, your car is the best off-road vehicle.

front-end dumpster fires, where nothing that is over 18 months old, can build, compile or get support anymore. In my day job, I inherit "fun" tasks as 'get this thing someone glued together with webpack4 and frontend-du-jour to work with webpack5 in 2022

Literate programs allow you to answer these questions naturally.

In 1994, The Unix-Haters Handbook was published containing a long list of missives about the software—everything from overly-cryptic command names that were optimized for Teletype machines, to irreversible file deletion, to unintuitive programs with far too many options. Over twenty years later, an overwhelming majority of these complaints are still valid even across the dozens of modern derivatives. Unix had become so widely used that changing its behavior would have challenging implications. For better

Object hierarchies are very different from relational hierarchies. Relational hierarchies focus on data and its relationships, whereas objects manage not only data, but also their identity and the behavior centered around that data.

it doesn't mean that we actually want all the instances in the heap to be reinitialized

The PA group has given the name cliche to commonly used programming constructs.

Understanding a strange codebase is hard.

too many of the coders I know would not honestly attempt it; they are in too much of a hurry to get the code written

C Interview Questions

the guide shall be written in such a way that all we have to do is produce the guide itself and then a computer can do the heavy lifting—where we might otherwise expect a separate, possibly GUI-driven, "app" to be created for the end user to interact with, we accomplish the same effect by making the guide very detailed—in part also an attempt to evoke the style and quality of old equipment operation and repair manuals that used to be available, when such manuals could be expected to include e.g. full schematics. If done correctly, this should be sufficient for the guide itself to be interpretable by a machine.

"Context" manipulation is one of big topic and there are many related terminologies (academic, language/implementation specific, promotion terminologies). In fact, there is confusing. In few minutes I remember the following related words and it is good CS exam to describe each :p Thread (Ruby) Green thread (CS terminology) Native thread (CS terminology) Non-preemptive thread (CS terminology) Preemptive thread (CS terminology) Fiber (Ruby/using resume/yield) Fiber (Ruby/using transfer) Fiber (Win32API) Generator (Python/JavaScript) Generator (Ruby) Continuation (CS terminology/Ruby, Scheme, ...) Partial continuation (CS terminology/ functional lang.) Exception handling (many languages) Coroutine (CS terminology/ALGOL) Semi-coroutine (CS terminology) Process (Unix/Ruby) Process (Erlang/Elixir) setjmp/longjmp (C) makecontext/swapcontext (POSIX) Task (...)

This (somewhat contrived) example allows the inner loop to abandon processing early: callcc {|cont|   for i in 0..4     print "\n#{i}: "     for j in i*5...(i+1)*5       cont.call() if j == 17       printf "%3d", j     end   end }

Make simple changes to (some carefully chosen fork of) any project in an afternoon, no matter how large it is. Gain an hour’s worth of understanding for an hour’s worth of effort, rather than a quantum leap in understanding after a week or month of effort.

Once you've written the imperative library/util code once, your components are super slim and completely reactive/declarative. Wow.

The yieldable objects currently supported are: promises thunks (functions) array (parallel execution) objects (parallel execution) generators (delegation) generator functions (delegation) Nested yieldable objects are supported, meaning you can nest promises within objects within arrays, and so on!

The power of await is that it lets you write asynchronous code using synchronous language constructs.

<a href="https://web.hypothes.is/help/" class="hyp-u-horizontal-spacing--2 hyp-u-layout-row--center HelpPanel-tabs__link" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span>Help topics</span>

Smalltalk image is unlike a collection of Java class files in that it can store your programs (both source and compiled bytecode), their data, and execution state. You can quit and save your work while some code is executing, move your image to an entirely different machine, load your image… and your program picks up where it left off.

Smalltalk has a virtual machine which allows you to execute your code on any platform where the VM can run. The image however is not only all your code, but the entire Smalltalk system, including said virtual machine (because of course it’s written in itself).

This was because dynamic typing doesn’t give the safety net that static typing does. So you write more tests. Which is a good thing.

I think one of the ways that remote work changes this is that I can do other things while I think through a tricky problem; I can do dishes or walk my dog or something instead of trying to look busy in a room with 6-12 other people who are furiously typing because that's how the manager and project manager understand that work gets done.

Python

The main idea behind the space-based pattern is the distributed shared memory to mitigate issues that frequently occur at the database level. The assumption is that by processing most of operations using in-memory data we can avoid extra operations in the database, thus any future problems that may evolve from there (for example, if your user activity data entity has changed, you don’t need to change a bunch of code persisting to & retrieving that data from the DB).The basic approach is to separate the application into processing units (that can automatically scale up and down based on demand), where the data will be replicated and processed between those units without any persistence to the central database (though there will be local storages for the occasion of system failures).

Microservices architecture consists of separately deployed services, where each service would have ideally single responsibility. Those services are independent of each other and if one service fails others will not stop running.

First of all, if you know the basics of architecture patterns, then it is easier for you to follow the requirements of your architect. Secondly, knowing those patterns will help you to make decisions in your code

Mikrokernel Architecture, also known as Plugin architecture, is the design pattern with two main components: a core system and plug-in modules (or extensions). A great example would be a Web browser (core system) where you can install endless extensions (or plugins).

The idea behind this pattern is to decouple the application logic into single-purpose event processing components that asynchronously receive and process events. This pattern is one of the popular distributed asynchronous architecture patterns known for high scalability and adaptability.

It is the most common architecture for monolithic applications. The basic idea behind the pattern is to divide the app logic into several layers each encapsulating specific role. For example, the Persistence layer would be responsible for the communication of your app with the database engine.

A model for understanding equality comparisons

Another option is the use the functional library Ramda, while the syntax may be a bit different from the Ruby and Pure JS version, I find it to be more declarive: list = [null, "say", "kenglish", "co", null] R.reject(R.isNil, list) // return new array [ 'say', 'kenglish', 'co' ]

In my method, program segments are embedded in the midst of a word processor document--like raisins in cake--so that the emphasis is on the explanation rather than the code.

Any language or system that does not allow full flowing and arbitrarily long comments is seriously behind the times. That we use escape characters to “escape” from code to comment is backwards. Ideally, comment should be the default, with a way to signal the occasional lines of code.

I'm not a naturally quick programmer. Learning to program was a real struggle for me and I was pretty slow at it for a long time (and I still am in aspects that I haven't practiced). My "one weird trick" is that I've explicitly worked on speeding up things that I do frequently and most people have not.

Wet behind the ears: the ones that have just started working as a professional programmers and need lots of guidance. Sort of knows what they are doing: professional programmers, who have sort of figured what is going on and can mostly finish their tasks on their own. Experienced: the ones who have been around the block for a while and are most likely the brains behind all the major design decisions of a large software project. Coworkers usually turn to them when they need advice for a hard technical problem. Some programmers will never reach this level, despite their official title stating otherwise (but more on that later).

The problem with the first approach is that it considers software development to be a deterministic process when, in fact, it’s stochastic. In other words, you can’t accurately determine how long it will take to write a particular piece of code unless you have already written it.

We would prefer: stay within single host language, but make code lookas declarative as possible.

you're guilty of making the same mistake as people who used to say that templates and styles and JavaScript should be in separate files

Build data pipelines, the easy way

This is what I call a leaky abstraction. TCP attempts to provide a complete abstraction of an underlying unreliable network, but sometimes, the network leaks through the abstraction and you feel the things that the abstraction can’t quite protect you from. This is but one example of what I’ve dubbed the Law of Leaky Abstractions:

I don’t even minify page assets

At the same time, details about programming language semantics are quite precise and when articles like this get things sort of wrong, it just leads to more confusion.

This post is about all the major disadvantages of Julia. Some of it will just be rants about things I particularly don't like - hopefully they will be informative, too.

I really hope they keep breaking it. Being the lead on a library for several years, most of the forced refactors were pretty straight forward and in almost every case made our code either more sound or easier to be consumed. Now I work on a runtime that embeds TypeScript and 3.5.1 has broken some code, thought it took me all of about 15 minutes to make the changes to adopt it, and in every case, it broke because we were being a bit loose with the types. While it didn't find any bugs, it made the code more "safe".

Changing every built-in function to accept anys would also "break" no one, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Part of TypeScript's value proposition is to catch errors; failing to catch an error is a reduction in that value and is something we have to weigh carefully against "Well maybe I meant that" cases.

Aside to global and local scope there is also something one could call a “block” scope. This is not an “official” type of scope, but it does exist. Block scope was introduced to JavaScript as a part of the ES6 specification. It was introduced along with two new types of variables let and const.

In javascript prettier-ignore ignores the next block, so what I did was just make the next few lines a block.

Rubyists don't call these things annotations. One of the things I like doing is to find common techniques that cross languages, for me this is a common technique and 'annotation' seems like a good generic word for it. I don't know if Rubyists will agree.

Languages may provide annotations in ways that don't reflect the syntax of the language

When writing about programming, I prefer to use 'annotation' as the general term. Although .NET was first, the word 'attribute' is just too widely used for different things.

An annotation on a program element (commonly a class, method, or field) is a piece of meta-data added to that program element which can be used to embellish that element with extra code.

When people talk about internal DSLs I see two styles: internal minilanguages and language enhancements.

Isolation ensures that concurrent execution of transactions leaves the database in the same state that would have been obtained if the transactions were executed sequentially

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treament.

We can also define these properties for data types that we do not control, for example providing a custom way of hashing a data type implemented by someone else

However, there is a definite trade off in these three snippets. The first one is overly specific but is understandable to any Scala programmer. The last one is beautiful and elegant if you understand the necessary concepts but incomprehensible otherwise.

ZIO ecosystem libraries generally do not directly expose any functional abstractions but still expose a highly compositional interface because their design is based on algebraic properties like this. Users don't have to learn about these abstractions unless they want to, they just get to benefit from better library design.

Open source is not a good business model.If you want to make money do literally anything else: try to sell software, do consulting, build a SAAS and charge monthly for it, rob a bank.

The only way for one person to even attempt cross-platform app is to use a UI abstraction layer like Qt, WxWidgets or Gtk.The problem is that Gtk is ugly, Qt is extremely bloated and WxWidgets barely works.

The visual and spacing differences between proportional and monospaced fonts

I try and act like a scientist. If I have a hypothesis about how this code is supposed to work, I test that hypothesis by changing the code, and seeing if it breaks in the way I expect. When I discover that my hypothesis is flawed, I might detour from the tutorial and do some research on Google. Or I might add it to a list of "things to explore later", if the rabbit hole seems to go too deep.

Things never go smoothly when it comes to software development. Inevitably, we'll hit a rough patch where the code doesn't do what we expect.This can either lead to a downward spiral—one full of frustration and self-doubt and impostor syndrome—or it can be seen as a fantastic learning opportunity. Nothing helps you learn faster than an inscrutable error message, if you have the right mindset.Honestly, we learn so much more from struggling and failing than we do from effortless success. With a growth mindset, the struggle might not be fun exactly, but it feels productive, like a good workout.

I had a concrete goal, something I really wanted, I was able to push through the frustration and continue making progress. If I had been learning this stuff just for fun, or because I thought it would look good on my résumé, I would have probably given up pretty quickly.

Multiple inheritance is one of the object oriented feature where a class or a sub class can inherit features from more than one parent class or super class.

Interface is collection of methods of abstract type (having empty body). It’s similar to Abstract class. Interface is blueprint of class. Interface specify what class must do and not how to.

[Huh? Pass-by-reference ALWAYS requires passing a reference by value. That's how it works. The question is whether the referenced object is a COPY of the caller's object, or an ALIAS for the user's value. Most modern languages pass by reference for non-primitive types.]

The keyword data tells us this is an inductive definition, that is, that we are defining a new datatype with constructors

The primary feature for easy maintenance is locality: Locality is that characteristic of source code that enables a programmer to understand that source by looking at only a small portion of it.

It’s fun but when would we ever use things like this in actual code?When it’s well tested, commented, documented, and becomes an understood idiom of your code base.We focus so much on black magic and avoiding it that we rarely have a chance to enjoy any of the benefits. When used responsibly and when necessary, it gives a lot of power and expressiveness.

In case writing to tmpfile fails for some reason, use && mv ... instead of ; mv ... -- that will keep $file from being overwritten with "bad" content.

Different ways to prepend a line: (echo 'line to prepend';cat file)|sponge file sed -i '1iline to prepend' file # GNU sed -i '' $'1i\\\nline to prepend\n' file # BSD printf %s\\n 0a 'line to prepend' . w|ed -s file perl -pi -e 'print"line to prepend\n"if$.==1' file

(Always call super to inherit the default behavior.)

It also makes it hard to centralize type coercions and default values.

Adding Object Oriented Principles (OOP) to a functional codebase adds yet another way of writing code, reducing consistency and clarity.

Same feature in TypeScript¶ It's worth mentioning that other languages have a shortcut for assignment var assignment directly from constructor parameters. So it seems especially painful that Ruby, despite being so beautifully elegant and succinct in other areas, still has no such shortcut for this. One of those other languages (CoffeeScript) is dead now, but TypeScript remains very much alive and allows you to write this (REPL): class Foo { constructor(public a:number, public b:number, private c:number) { } } instead of this boilerplate: class Foo { constructor(a, b, c) { this.a = a; this.b = b; this.c = c; } } (The public/private access modifiers actually disappear in the transpiled JavaScript code because it's only the TypeScript compiler that enforces those access modifiers, and it does so at compile time rather than at run time.) Further reading: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/classes.html#parameter-properties https://basarat.gitbook.io/typescript/future-javascript/classes#define-using-constructor https://kendaleiv.com/typescript-constructor-assignment-public-and-private-keywords/ I actually wouldn't mind being able to use public/private modifiers on instance var parameters in Ruby, too, but if we did, I would suggest making that be an additional optional shortcut (for defining accessor methods for those instance vars) that builds on top of the instance var assignment parameter syntax described here. (See more detailed proposal in #__.) Accessors are more of a secondary concern to me: we can already define accessors pretty succinctly with attr_accessor and friends. The bigger pain point that I'm much more interested in having a succinct shortcut for is instance var assignment in constructors. initialize(@a, @b, @c) syntax¶ jsc (Justin Collins) wrote in #note-12: jjyr (Jinyang Jiang) wrote: I am surprised this syntax has been repeatedly requested and rejected since 7 years ago. ... As someone who has been writing Ruby for over 10 years, this syntax is exactly that I would like. I grow really tired of writing def initialize(a, b, c) @a = a @b = b @c = c end This would be perfect: def initialize(@a, @b, @c) end I'm a little bit sad Matz is against this syntax, as it seems so natural to me. Me too!! I've been writing Ruby for over 15 years, and this syntax seems like the most obvious, simple, natural, clear, unsurprising, and Ruby-like. I believe it would be readily understood by any Rubyist without any explanation required. Even if you saw it for the first time, I can't think of any way you could miss or misinterpret its meaning: since @a is in the same position as a local variable a would normally be, it seems abundantly clear that instead of assigning to a local variable, we're just assigning to the variable @a instead and of course you can reference the @a variable in the constructor body, too, exactly the same as you could with a local variable a passed as an argument. A workaround pattern¶ In the meantime, I've taken to defining my constructor and list of public accessors (if any) like this: attr_reader \ :a, :b def new( a, b) @a, @b = a, b end ... which is still horrendously boilerplatey and ugly, and probably most of you will hate — but by lining up the duplicated symbols into a table of columns, I like that I can at least more easily see the ugly duplication and cross-check that I've spelled them all correctly and handled them all consistently. :shrug: Please??¶ Almost every time I write a new class in Ruby, I wish for this feature and wonder if we'll ever get it. Can we please?

For attributes, methods and constructors, you can use the one of the following:

Introduce behaviour that is likely to surprise users. Instead have due consideration for patterns adopted by other commonly-used languages.

Emit clean, idiomatic, recognizable JavaScript code.

The encapsulation is enforced by the language. It is a syntax error to refer to # names from out of scope.

When defining accessors in Ruby, there can be a tension between brevity (which we all love) and best practice.

Yeah, "virtual attribute" seems like dated terminology to me, so conceptually just a method.

I see a 'virtual attribute' as something we're forced to implement when using frameworks, ORMs and the like. Something that lets us inject our code into the path of whatever metaprogramming has been put in place for us. In a simple PORO like this, I don't see how it has meaning; it's just a method. :)

has_sauce is a "virtual attribute", a characteristic of the model that's dependent on the underlying toppings attribute.

in languages (like JavaScript and Java) where external objects do have direct access to instance vars

Setting an instance variable by going through a setter is good practice, and using two access modifiers is the way to accomplish that for a read-only instance variable

“We want to be an example of what a modern, fast web app can do,” he says. “And we want to blow a few minds while we’re at it.”