programming

Tony Finch revisits his Gregorian-to-Julian day conversion algorithm, incorporating tricks from Ben Joffe to produce a more efficient and robust formula.

The article highlights a clever trick where a file is a valid DOS COM executable, demonstrating a polyglot file format.

A blog post exploring quirky behaviors in Python's raw string literals and f-string syntax, including examples where raw strings cannot end in a backslash and f-string expressions can contain comments and multiple lines.

AI has made learning to code significantly easier by acting as a patient, 24/7 personal tutor that explains concepts, debugs code, and guides learners step-by-step without judgment.

Casey Muratori demonstrates how following 'clean code' guidelines like polymorphism and small functions can lead to significant runtime performance costs, using a classic shape area example.

Discusses Elon Musk's claim that programming will eventually die as AI generates binaries directly from text descriptions, comparing source code to assembly and reflecting on verification and abstraction challenges.

A video demonstrates a quine written in Piet, an esoteric language where programs are images. A 252x189 GIF serves as both the program and its output, printing itself byte for byte.

A video transcript discussing how to avoid panics in Rust by using combinators and the Result type instead of unwrap, explaining the three typical crash causes and emphasizing writing robust code.

Joel Spolsky argues that UI programming is easy and fun, and that good UI design follows rational rules rather than artistic mystique, illustrating with a personal anecdote about controlling his environment at a bakery job.

A technical discussion about EPIPE errors on write, suggesting that encountering EPIPE often indicates a design issue in how the program handles broken pipes.

This article explores the challenges of parsing the C `sizeof` operator, which can take either an expression or a parenthesized type, and the extra complications introduced by compound literals and postfix operators. It discusses parsing strategies and notes that C2y's newly introduced `_Countof` operator faces similar issues.

A blog post exploring the nonexistent dates of October 5-14, 1582 due to the Gregorian calendar reform, and how Ruby, Python, and Perl handle these invalid dates.

An explainer analyzing the real-world cost of AI models for programming, comparing DeepSeek Flash and OpenAI's Luna via token pricing, caching distributions, and subscription math.

An article explaining why floating point numbers are a leaky abstraction, covering precision limits, subtraction issues, and overflow/underflow, with references to Goldberg's classic paper.

collections.ChainMap is a built-in Python class that groups multiple dictionaries or mappings into a single, updatable view without merging them in memory.

A blog post presenting a universal approach to mocking in testing by using continuations to capture effects, allowing tests to verify correct arguments and order of calls without performing the effects. The technique is demonstrated in the Gleam programming language.

A game that lets players build a computer from scratch using logic gates, design circuits, construct a CPU, and run programs.

A practical book introducing logic for programmers to improve software design, verification, and reasoning, covering topics from simplifying conditionals to formal verification and constraint solving.

This article argues that large language models represent a new level in the history of software abstraction, making natural language the interface, enhancing human agency, but not ending programming—instead, continuing the trend of intention replacing implementation.

A reflective essay on how AI-assisted reading and coding reduce the cognitive strain once essential for deep learning, and the author's personal efforts to restore that mental challenge through handwriting and code-by-hand.