Tagged programming (Blog)

• May 30, 2023, 8:30 PM -04:00

  I Enjoy Writing Software

  Vague meanderings on programming and debugging

  I enjoy writing software more than I enjoy using software. I'm not berating myself over this, nor am I proud of it. It's just how I am.

  What this means in practice is that I will often write a whole bunch of code before I even start trying to debug it. Writing code tickles what I imagine is the creative part of my brain, and it feels good. Running and debugging code tickles the "chore" part of my brain and it doesn't feel as good.

  (Yes, programming is creative. It's an act of creation. I'm emphasizing this point because there is a tendency in non-technical circles to view programming as something sterile or clinical, like accounting. I would imagine, however, that there are very few accountants who do accounting in their spare time, whereas you can easily find tons of programmers who do coding in their spare time, myself included).

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• Apr 11, 2022, 8:13 PM -04:00

  The Philosophy of TypeScript Enums

  #TypeScript enums are kind of weird

  I'm a pretty big fan of TypeScript, probably best described as a statically typed language that transpiles to standard JavaScript. I've written about it before.

  People who have worked with me in the past may be surprised at my admiration, given the rancour I occasionally direct at something like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler, which to the casual eye seems to be in a similar vein.

  The similarities, however, are superficial; TypeScript and GWT are quite different beasts. Something like GWT is used in web development in order to avoid writing JavaScript. TypeScript, on the other hand, is best viewed as JavaScript extended with an optional static typing system. The optional part is key; in theory, any JavaScript program is also a valid TypeScript program. In other words, TypeScript doesn't try to hide the fact that it's merely an enhanced version of JavaScript.

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• Aug 25, 2021, 9:17 PM -04:00

  Git is Terrible

  I cannot be the only one who thinks that git is awful

  If I say that my professional life has spanned RCS, CVS, Mercurial and Git, this tell you something (depressing) about my age.

  Like everyone else, I'm now a git user, but I still say that Mercurial was the most elegant of the bunch, at least in terms of its emmiently predictable and well-designed CLI, even if the software itself gave up the ghost years ago.

  Back in the day, when version control systems were still duking it out, I used to try and defend Mercurial to rabid git fans, mostly to no avail. I always felt that I was at a bit of a disadvantage in those conversation (cue the git fans yelling "Yeah, cuz mercurial SUCKS!"), because I was always willing to concede, despite appreciating Mercurial's virtues, that git actually did have its strengths as well as its weaknesses, while the git fans were rarely so magnanimous with any other VCS.

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• Sep 2, 2018, 4:03 PM -04:00

  Angst and the Angular Module System

  Google's AngularJS is one of the most popular web frameworks out there, but it comes with its share of criticism (performance around two way binding being one of the more prominent complaints). Google responded by releasing Angular 2 (and, as of now, 4, 5 and 6), which addressed some of the issues but at the cost of being drastically incompatible with its predecessor, with no realistic way to upgrade except through pure elbow grease. Angular 2+ might as well be a completely different framework.

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• Jan 18, 2018, 8:46 PM -05:00

  Static Typing, IDEs, Automated Testing: An Eternal Golden Braid

  I've been a programmer by trade ever since I graduated from University. This is a fairly long time, as these things are measured. I still consider myself on a learning curve, but that's a separate conversation.

  My career, such as it is, mostly sidestepped the whole static versus dynamic typing debate that roiled in the early 2000's. School, when it veered into software territory, mostly consisted of C and Java, two statically typed languages. My professional life, until fairly recently, has been mostly in Java (with a bit of C++ thrown in for good measure) and hence has almost exclusively revolved around statically typed languages.

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• Sep 25, 2015, 10:48 PM -04:00

  Yet Another Requirements Versus Setup Post

  In a previous post I wrote down some notes on the current state of the python packaging ecosystem. I felt that this was useful because most of the information that I found online was out of date or spread out in various places.

  One area that still confuses me is the relative merits of requirements.txt versus setup.py files. Ironically, the best article I've read on the subject is aimed at ruby developers. I think python developers should read it - it's surprising (or maybe not so surprising) how similar the ecosystems are in this respect. I've even made a handy Rosetta stone, which is hopefully not completely inaccurate:

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• Sep 22, 2015, 2:15 AM -04:00

  Generating Pylint Badges

  Badges, on github and other code sharing sites, are a way to communicate small snippets of information concerning the status of your repository. They generally appear on your README file, so they are one of the first things you see when you load a repository page.

  On my yawt page, for example, you can see several badges for things like my travis build status, and my GPA at code climate.

  One thing that I couldn't find, however, was a pylint badge - a simple status that displayed your pylint score. This surprised me; it seemed like it should have been a common thing to want to do. Indeed, I'm still not 100% sure that I haven't simply overlooked something glaringly obvious.

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• Aug 20, 2015, 1:48 AM -04:00

  Emacs and Python

  I use Emacs as a python IDE. The web already offers a significant number of resources on the subject but I've made a couple of specialized tweaks that I feel may be worth sharing. So here we go.

  Why am I doing this? Well, the simple answer is that I like using Emacs. I do most of my writing in it. I use it as my task manager and TODO list. I have, in the past, used it as my email client. So it makes sense that I would use it as my python development environment. Your mileage may vary.

  I am mainly a Java developer and Eclipse user at work. Eclipse makes Java programming somewhat tolerable. I use the following features heavily:

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• Jan 16, 2015, 1:43 AM -05:00

  Coming to Terms With the Nightmare That Is Python Packaging

  I started YAWT a while ago, in python, because a) I wanted to learn a dynamically typed programming language and b) python seemed like a relatively easy, fun, popular, not insensible choice. To be fair, it is a fun language to use.

  At the time, I gave very little thought actually packaging yawt - i.e. making it easy for someone to actually install and use. Mostly, I simply didn't think I'd ever have to do this - yawt was my baby, and I was the only one using it, so why bother?

  My opinion about this has changed somewhat in recent months. I still don't think yawt is likely to be used by anyone but myself, but I find myself wanting to learn at least a little about how the python packaging system works - if only for myself. I mean, it should at least be easy for me to install it, right?

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• Oct 16, 2014, 1:01 AM -04:00

  Thoughts on Modularizing Flask Applications

  I've been playing around with the Flask web framework for a while now. It's the basis for YAWT, the CMS/blogging system I'm currently developing (mostly as an exercise in familiarizing myself with Python)

  With Flask, it's dead simple to get a very basic web application up and running:

  Put this in a python file called blah.py, mark it as executable, and run it. You should be able to access the web application on locahost:5000. It does not, admittedly, do anything even remotely interesting, but it's enough to get the basic idea.

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• Jul 6, 2008, 7:00 PM -04:00

  Error Handling in Perl

  Okay, this won't be the most exciting entry in the world. There are several different ways of logging or recording errors and warnings in perl, and I find I easily get confused. So this entry will serve as a very, very basic reference for me. Other people may find it useful. Or not.

  Taken from the Perl 5.10.0 documentation:

  Outside an eval, prints the value of LIST to STDERR and exits with the current value of $! (errno). If $! is 0 , exits with the value of ($?>> 8) (backtick command status). If ($?>> 8) is 0, exits with 255. Inside an eval(), the error message is stuffed into $@ and the eval is terminated with the undefined value. This makes die the way to raise an exception.

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• Feb 13, 2008, 4:31 PM -05:00

  Scoping in Perl

  I just read a very clear tutorial on Perl scoping mechanisms:

  http://perl.plover.com/FAQs/Namespaces.html

  I often get bitten by scoping issues but unfortunately (or fortunately?) it's usually easier in Perl to work around your problem than to understand the reasons behind it.

  One part I found interesting was the section labelled "The Current Package" which explains the use of the package command in Perl. There is a tendency (or, at least, I have a tendency) to conflate the use of the Perl package command and, say, the use of the Java package declaration because they are often used to achieve the same effect, namely the separation of namespaces, and also because, by convention, they are used in a syntactically similar way. Because of this, it is easy to forget that the package command in Perl is just that: a command. You can call it from anywhere, multiple time from the same file even, and the effect is simply to change the current package - which in itself doesn't have a huge effect on how you write your code, just the way to access your variables.

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