Chris_Newton

12 ms·

61.
by Chris_Newton 2y ago
This is a disadvantage of the more dynamic languages, I find. IDEs for languages like C++ and Java are relatively fast and accurate when jumping to definitions, showing references, performing automated refactorings and so on. I rarely see t
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
I’m a big fan of writing things down for future reference. Keeping a journal with things like exactly which commands I used, or transferring that knowledge to something like a README or a wiki page for others to see, is a low effort but som
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
In Sublime, there is a command to paste while matching the indentation as well. I think it’s Ctrl+Shift+V on most platforms by default. Maybe that’s what you’re looking for?
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
Possibly my all-time favourite XKCD, Is it worth the time?¹ , demonstrates two important points. If you only do something very rarely anyway, spending time to automate it won’t have a great ROI. But for things you do moderately often that
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
This hasn’t been my experience. One attraction of functional programming style is that you tend to separate pure/declarative code from effects, one way or another, and then express each using familiar patterns of computation or interac
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
Indeed. Category 3 seems to be about developers who insist on using Gooby regardless of whether or not it’s a reasonable choice for solving the current problem. What about developers who simply have Gooby as one tool in their toolbox, know
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
There can be all kinds of strange and possibly perverse incentives at work for the “original content producers”, too. Forums like LinkedIn have had regular listings in recent times looking for programmers to help train new models for answer
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
Ideally a LLM would have every text in existence in its training set, right? Only if every text in existence provides good source material to factor into generating the response. Given that half of all texts are even worse than average, t
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Remote preferred (occasional travel OK) Offering hands-on software development and technical leadership services, I specialise in: • Mathematical, scientific and engineering applications • Software for hardwar
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
As a developer of a similar vintage, I can relate to this mindset, but I think we should be careful about it. We learned in an era when differences in browser behaviour were a big deal and new versions of browsers sometimes came along years
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
I used literate programming for a multi-year project in a specialist field with a lot of technical details once. I was working solo but on behalf of a client, and I was working in Haskell to replace an earlier system I’d written in Python,
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Remote preferred (occasional travel OK) Offering hands-on software development and technical leadership services, I specialise in: • Mathematical, scientific and engineering applications • Software for hardwar
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
Major Python libraries pretty much never just remove things over the course of a single major release. Things get officially announced first, then deprecated for at least one release cycle but often longer (which is communicated via Deprec
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
social expectations around Python package versioning are very different from JS package version If anything, I’d say in my experience the Python community tends to be more willing to make big changes. After all, Python itself famously d
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by Chris_Newton 2y ago
It's a problem because you can only have one version of any given package in your dependency tree. You can't have `foo 2` and `foo 3` in your dependency tree. That does seem to be the fundamental problem with the Python model of
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Remote preferred (occasional travel OK) I have over 20 years’ experience building software, specialising in: • Technical applications (mathematical, scientific, engineering) • Software for hardware (IoT, embed
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
There actually is a return address on the back of the envelope that was open. However, given the story so far, it seems remarkably generous to trust that anything sent back there would firstly arrive at all, secondly result in a valid repla
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
There are certainly other plausible explanations for what I received. If there were some way I could check those stamps were legitimate, the question would be academic anyway. The whole process is pretty daft if you think about it, though.
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Unfortunately, in this case the item was delivered by Royal Mail themselves and left in our mail box, so there was no opportunity to do anything like that. I might have bought the idea of a mechanical issue causing the opening if it had bee
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
I don’t know whether I should post this as it may be an ongoing case, but not so long ago I sent off my old stamps to the official “swap out” service to have them replaced by the new barcoded ones. A few days later, I did indeed receive equ
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
if you do this your difftool becomes a compiler Some linters and formatters are effectively compilers already, so that doesn’t seem completely implausible in itself. Finding canonical representations of common coding patterns so you can q
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
graph is a data structure, not a data type. It can refer to either. Any concrete data structure that uses indirection — which means pretty much anything more complicated than dense arrays and records — is indeed a form of graph. But graph
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
But it's orders of magnitude too slow and memory-inefficient for performance-sensitive graph computations—if you have even moderately sized graphs and graph algorithms are a bottleneck, you'll need to use something else, and prob
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Remote preferred (occasional travel OK) I have over 20 years’ experience building software, specialising in: • Technical applications (mathematical, scientific, engineering) • Software for hardware (IoT, embed
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
The thing is, there are a lot of small systems maintained by a lot of small teams. Unfortunately, when Joel wrote “They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Again, I like a lot of the thinking behind this. I’m personally a big fan of having clear data models and data flows, and I think there is a lot of potential in ideas like reactivity that clearly define sources of truth and relationships in
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
I have actually started to think that, against conventional wisdom, everything should be a global variable. All the issues with global variables can be solved with better tracing tooling. This is an interesting premise, and actually I thi
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
It seems a stretch to call having a + character at the start of an added line “its own language”. Staging one line of the two in your example probably takes less than five seconds using this method; in the editor, you just delete the line y
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
Is there something unusual about your example that means (e)dit doesn’t work if you want to treat those lines as separate hunks? Usually if you have multiple logical changes that are adjacent and get recognised as a single change by default
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by Chris_Newton 3y ago
I’m not sure there is any fundamental difference. IMHO the defining characteristic of this declarative UI style is that the rendered UI is regenerated from the logical state of the system that comes from somewhere else and not stateful itse

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