@movq@www.uninformativ.de Somewhere or another, I think in a William Byrd talk, I heard it suggested that the best ideas in computer science should fit on an index card (ah yes it’s this one: https://paperswelove.org/2017/video/will-byrd-most-beautiful-program/ ). He was referring to the basic principles of LISP/the lambda calculus, which have sometimes been called the Maxwell’s equations of computer programming (by Alan Kay). Simple, short, elegant, but very densely packed with meaning–generations of people have spent their whole careers unpacking what those simple rules can do.

Much of modern software feels like the polar opposite of that. Not only can you not write it on an index card, you never will be able to because people who write software don’t seem to aspire to try. I wish more people thought this way though!

Imperative programming is comfy

Best way to write programs: turn off the computer.

@johanbove@johanbove.info Is there any reason to use this program? I can’t remember when I last had it installed, must have been early 2000’s.

Notes et astuces intéressantes pour #awk: https://eradman.com/posts/awk-programming.html

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha! yeah sounds about like my HS CS program. A math teacher taught visual basic and pascal. and over on the other end of the school we had “electronics” which was a room next to the auto body class where they had a bunch of random computer parts scavenged from the district decommissioned surplus storage.

The advanced class would piece together training kits for the basic class to put together.

@prologic@twtxt.net High five, I’m “generation Java” as well! 😂 There were some leftovers of C++, we used that in the computer graphics courses in Uni a lot. But pretty much anything else that involved programming was Java.

(There was nothing even remotely resembling CS in our “high school”. That school neither had the required teachers nor the equipment / PCs.)

I finally found the NASM assembler.

https://nasm.us/index.php

I had heard that name before, many times, but somehow never looked into it. Weird. 🤨🤔

This is the kind of program I was looking for.

1. It is free software. Especially in the DOS ecosystem, free/libre software is a very scarce resource.
   
2. It’s a small command line program, not a huge behemoth.
   
3. Documentation appears to be well written.
   
4. It can even cross-compile DOS binaries from Linux.

I’m really bad at competitive programming. 🙄 For today’s #AdventOfCode puzzle, I spent an eternity trying to understand exactly what kind of bG9naWMgY2lyY3VpdAo= the puzzle input describes – I haven’t done that in well over a decade, so I made little progress. I knew right from the start that SSBoYWQgdG8gbG9vayBmb3IgY3ljbGUgbGVuZ3RocyBhbmQgdGhlbiBmaW5kIHRoZSBMQ00K. It just didn’t occur to me to just run my program on cGFydGlhbCBpbnB1dAo= and print those numbers. 🥴 I only did that after over 4 hours (including time to debug my nasty C code) and then, boom, solution …

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -Robert A. Heinlein

So today’s #adventofcode was solved with no programming. Just a bit o maths and wolfram/alpha

How did I just find this program? Reptyr: Reparent a running program to a new terminal: https://github.com/nelhage/reptyr

Inspiration
⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Blockchain in Sustainable Programming
The benefits of blockchain implementation across multiple sectors are well-documented, but how can this decentralised solution be used to achieve more sustainable programming?

As the effects of the ongoing climate crisis continue to impact weather patterns and living conditions across the planet, we must continue to make every aspect of our lives, from transport and energy usage to all of our technology, greener and more sustain … ⌘ Read more

@phoronix@feeds.twtxt.net

For those fond of the COBOL programming language

😆

GnuCOBOL 3.2 Released After 2+ Years In Development
For those fond of the COBOL programming language and continuing to make use of it in new development efforts, GnuCOBOL 3.2 was released on Friday as the latest feature update for this 21+ year old free software effort around being an open-source COBOL implementation… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, I’d be up for thinking about that. At least at the protocol and design level–I’m afraid I can’t help much with Go programming.

I played with nlpodyssey/verbaflow: Neural Language Model for Go today a little bit today…. First I had to download a ~2GB file (the model), then convert that to a format the program verbaflow understands which came out to roughly ~5GB. Then I tried some of the samples in the README. My god, this this is so goddamn awfully slow its like watching paint dry 😱 All just to predict the next few tokens?! 😳 I had a look at the resource utilisation as well as it was trying to do this “work”, using 100% of 1.5 Cores and ~10GB of Memory 😳 Who da fuq actually thinks any of this large language model (LLM) and neural network crap is actually any good or useful? 🤔 Its just garbage 🤣

Bug Bounties May Sound Great, But Aren’t Always Handled Well
Bug bounty programs setup by large corporations to reward and recognize security researchers for properly reporting new bugs and security vulnerabilities is a great concept, but in practice isn’t always handled well. Security researcher Adam Zabrocki recently shared the troubles he encountered in the bug bounty handling at Google for Chrome OS and in turn for Intel with it having been an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability… ⌘ Read more

According to the RedMonk programming language rankings from Jan 2023, Go and Scala are tied at 14th place 😏

1 JavaScript
2 Python
3 Java
4 PHP
5 C#
6 CSS
7 TypeScript
7 C++
9 Ruby
10 C
11 Swift
12 Shell
12 R
14 Go
14 Scala
16 Objective-C
17 Kotlin
18 PowerShell
19 Rust
19 Dart

Image

being immersed in gorgeous #nature makes me want to write elegant programs, I’m amazed by the underlying systems #coding #phylosophy

Fanservice
⌘ Read more

On the topic of Programming Languages and Telemetry. I’m kind of curious… Do any of these programming language and their toolchains collect telemetry on their usage and effectively “spy” on your development?

• Python
  
• C
  
• C++
  
• Java
  
• C#
  
• Visual Basic
  
• Javascript
  
• SQL
  
• Assembly Language
  
• PHP

Tutorial: Getting started with generics - The Go Programming Language – Okay @xuu@txt.sour.is I quite like Go’s generics now 🤣 After going through this myself I like the semantics and the syntax. I’m glad they did a lot of work on this to keep it simple to both understand and use (just like the rest of Go) 👌

Image

ChatGPT is good, but it’s not that good 🤣 I asked it to write a program in Go that performs double ratcheting and well the code is total garbage 😅 – Its only as good as the inputs it was trained on 🤣 #OpenAI #GPT3

I started reading the proposal to introduce operator overloading in Go version 2 that I like to see: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/27605 Now a few hours later I ended up at this gem. Write a program that makes 2+2=5: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/28786/write-a-program-that-makes-2-2-5 There are some awesone solutions. :-)

Tell me you write go like javascript without telling me you write go like javascript:

import "runtime/debug"

var Commit = func() string {
  if info, ok := debug.ReadBuildInfo(); ok {
    for _, setting := range info.Settings {
      if setting.Key == "vcs.revision" {
        return setting.Value
      }
    }
  }

  return "" 
}()

https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2022/11/14/3-ways-embed-commit-hash-go-programs#3__using_runtime_debug_package

If I have an image that has clearly been naïvely upscaled, is there a program that can reasonably reliably tell me what the “true” size is?

I present you klebe https://git.sr.ht/~noizhardware/klebe a small library to connect programs, has a common device memory and an audio process, no need for midi, osc, tdp, just throw bytes around!!

funny how a stack-based machine might actually be a welcoming environment for functional reactive programming #frp #coding #raven #666cpu

Netflix Raises Monthly Subscription Prices in US, Canada
Netflix has raised its monthly subscription price by $1 to $2 per month in the United States depending on the plan, the company said on Friday, to help pay for new programming to compete in the crowded streaming TV market. From a report: The standard plan, which allows for two simultaneous streams, now costs $15.49 per month, up from $13.99, in the Unite … ⌘ Read more

My kid just uncovered a bug in a program I wrote by grabbing my laptop and smacking the keyboard a bunch. Biological input fuzzing; a real-life chaos monkey.

translating programs https://side-effects.neocities.org/technology/re-understanding-programming-forth.html

I wrote a ‘banner’-like program for Plan 9 (and p9p) that uses the Unicode box drawing characters: http://txtpunk.com/banner/index.html

SPACE PROGRAM SPACE PROGRAM // time to focus on mathematics, APL, and music

If [you take] a look at how APLers communicate when they have ideas, you see code all the time, all day long. The APL community is the only one I’ve seen that regularly can write complete code and talk about it fluently on a whiteboard between humans without hand waving. Even my beloved Scheme programming language cannot boast this. When working with humans on a programming task, almost no one uses their programming languages that primary communication method between themselves and other humans outside of the presence of a computer. That signals to me that they are not, in fact, natural, expedient tools for communicating ideas to other humans. The best practices utilized in most programming languages are, instead, attempts to ameliorate the situation to make the code as tractable and as manageable as possible, but they do not, primarily, represent a demonstration of the naturalness of those languages to human communication. — aaron hsu

Plan 9 is GSoC! 🎉🐇 I’ve missed participating this program. https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Ta35cde1382617430-M32af07f289087f227189b74f/plan-9-in-summer-of-code

i’d say in most cases, having another program in the mix is not the solution unless the problem is inherently technical and other software either misses the point, or solves a different (possibly overlapping) problem. its easy to think that hitting things with keyboards is a universal solution. especially if you have a lot of experience doing that. the common blindness of software people is the human elements that are often handled by other teams which eventually frame problems in technical terms for developers to deal with. then the naive developer goes home thinking they can replace the humans that make their work possible.

thanks to the peculiar tenacity of fixed-width typefaces, most programming languages can still be comfortably written on a 50-year-old typewriter. How’s that for backward compatibility?

Finally creating PHP programs using Composer and Twig templates

I’m going to call all “apps” programs again as part of my retro-computing experience.

I’ve been learning C from the second edition C Programming Language book by Kernighan and Ritchie. Good times.