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paedubucher

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nostarch.com 3mo ago

NoStarch: No Login Link?

paedubucher
1pts3
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: Which hard skills can I learn to become a better programmer?

paedubucher
35pts18
paedubucher.ch 2y ago

Learning Algorithms

paedubucher
60pts24
paedubucher.ch 5y ago

Tests Are Not Specifications

paedubucher
3pts4
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

How do you spend the five minutes a build takes?

paedubucher
16pts24
falschmeldungen.ch 5y ago

Fake News Headline Satire Page (German)

paedubucher
1pts0
paedubucher.ch 5y ago

Arch Linux Setup with Encryption (LVM on LUKS)

paedubucher
4pts0
paedubucher.ch 5y ago

Basic Printing on OpenBSD

paedubucher
58pts27
paedubucher.ch 5y ago

X Compose Key Instead of Swiss Keyboard Layout

paedubucher
2pts0
paedubucher.ch 5y ago

OpenBSD on the Desktop. GUI Tweaks Etcetera

paedubucher
2pts0
paedubucher.ch 5y ago

OpenBSD on the Desktop. Basic Setup with X and dwm

paedubucher
3pts0
paedubucher.ch 5y ago

Minimalistic Desktop on FreeBSD

paedubucher
4pts0
paedubucher.ch 5y ago

Implementing a «Four in a Row» Board in Haskell

paedubucher
2pts0
paedubucher.ch 5y ago

Tutorial: Virtual Machines with Libvirt and Networking

paedubucher
2pts0
paedubucher.ch 6y ago

Table-Driven Test Design

paedubucher
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

A Numeric Type for Go?

paedubucher
4pts1
gist.github.com 7y ago

Prolog: Finding Out If Hamilton Becomes Formula 1 Champion in the 2018 US GP

paedubucher
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Which Text Editors Do Great Hackers/Programmers Use?

paedubucher
3pts5
paedubucher.ch 7y ago

Distracted by Tools. The Sorry State of Computer Science Tuition

paedubucher
1pts0
gist.github.com 7y ago

Why C Function Macros Are Bad

paedubucher
1pts1
paedubucher.ch 7y ago

Cargo Cult: Getting It Wrong by Wanting It Right

paedubucher
1pts0

Did they just re-design their website and removed the login button? I cannot find it, and I'd like to access the eBooks I paid money for. Are they running some A/B tests and I'm keep getting the same version?

[dead] 2 years ago

In the context of version control, some formatting rules work better than others.

Python has some functional capabilities, but in my experiences with Python devs, those are little used and even shunned.

I like to use things like filter, map, reduce or list comprehensions, but I see very few of those in my coworkers' code bases.

When Python introduced pattern matching, it was rather a pattern-aware switch/case, which does not return a value, as such a construct in a functional programming would do.

I went from Ruby to Elixir, and even with my basic Clojure experience, it was an effort.

I tried out Elixir twice so far, and since the last time, I worked through 300 pages of SICP. I still have to twist my mind when I'd like to process nested maps or the like in Elixir now.

It was worth it, but I think the apparently similarity of Elixir to Ruby is actually a negative.

However, Ruby provides a lot of higher-order functions, such as group_by and the like. If you're used to functional-style Ruby code, the transition is easier.

One pattern I noticed in the workplace: People are mocking things like LISP, Haskell, or Erlang, but get a hard-on when their bread language (e.g. Python) introduces new syntax for, say, pattern matching (rather a pattern-aware switch/case, because it isn't an expression).

I hereby publicly announce that I use Arch Linux. I really do so for more than five years now, and I'm not thinking about switching. OK, maybe to OpenBSD for a change now and then.

PS: Did I mention, that I use Arch Linux?

PPS: Did I mention, that I'm thinking of switching to OpenBSD?

PPPS: OK, back to Arch Linux, I'm not tough enough for OpenBSD.

PPPPS: Did I mention that I'm back at running Arch Linux, by the way?

Brad Fitzpatrick stated in one of his talks, that a version of Go coming with generics will be called 2.0 eventually. Maybe they do the version jump if there are backward-incompatible changes done to the library in 1.19.

When I read Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" in school, I mentioned to my teacher that the investigator reminds me of Columbo. I only remember my teacher answering me, that Columbo is one of the few crime series to be of good quality.

Almost fifteen years later I read this:

“The Columbo character was based squarely on Porfiry Petrovich, the astute but meandering lead investigator in Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment.”

Which makes me kind of happy :-)

When you read the entire section of the book, Martin claims that those tests main purpose is to serve as a normative documentation. The developer can read the test case and then figure out what was meant to be programmed.

While it might be illuminating in some cases, it might be not helpful or either misleading in other cases.

It's like arguing that the main purpose of magazines is to lit a fire with them, because some of them are very flammable.

Tests are good to ensure that some property of the system that held true before still holds true after some modifications to the system has been made.

This (my) little rant is of course hyperbolic, but I tried to make two points:

1. The actual specification is sometimes better reflected by the implementation than by some test cases. 2. Some test cases don't help you understanding what's supposed to be computed.

Of course, counterexamples could be made. Imagine a board game with a test function testing specific moves. Those test cases will help you understand the implementation a lot.

I am really a beginner of both Scala and functional programming. I took the first Coursera course on Scala, and I got really frightened when I noticed that you can express many things in either the functional or in the object-oriented paradigm. One example is pattern matching vs. polymorphism. When you mix up those ideas throughout your code base, it might become really hard to understand.

This is just a thought that I had, and I wonder if that's actually a relevant issue in practice.

I actually got in touch with the author because of this remark, because this subject wasn't even discussed in the article at all. It looks like virtue signaling to me. Such remarks really make me cringe.