A Definition of Magic in Programming Languages
Goto Is Not A Horror
Don't Repeat Yourself and the Strong Law of Small Numbers
The Universe's Most Advanced Aliens
The Streampocalypse and the Importance of First Principles Thinking
In the 21st century, Wall Street went gaga for subscription revenue.
There are many good reasons for this. Software releases turn out to be a clean example of this, so I’m going to talk about that for simplicity, but it applies to a greater or lesser extent to many other business transactions as well.
Understanding GPT A Bit Better
Here is something you can try to understand ChatGPT and similar systems better, by looking in to your own brain.
I’m going to write three statements here. I want to you to introspectively examine your own reaction to them. These will not be trick statements; I am not trying to fool you or embarass you, even in your own mind. I am simply going to present these statements to you and I want you to observe your own internal reactions.
Validity of Values In Programming Languages
A point touched upon in my Interfaces and Nil in Go, or, Don’t Lie to Computers that deserves full expansion is, what exactly does it mean for a value to be valid?
It is something that I think many would consider obvious at first, but if you dig into it… and programming generally does make us dig into things like this… it becomes less obvious.
But if you are one who thinks it’s obvious, riddle me this. I have a
string containing the six characters “here's
”.
Is it valid?
Apologies for RSS Burst
Abuse of Sum Types In OO Languages
Sum types are useful, but they are also an attractive nuisance in object oriented languages. There's a certain type of programmer who gets a taste of functional programming and has a good time, but misinterprets that good time to mean that sum types are always better, because they are FP, and FP is Better.
But sum types are not generally better, they are specifically better. Using sum types, or even forcing sum types into languages that don't really have them like C, is a valid solution for certain problems, but in most cases they are not the best choice.
To understand when sum types are best, you must understand something called...