Why (Python) type hinting sucks
I don’t agree with the post - type hinting is awesome in my experience - but it’s a cleverly-crafted argument and there’s some interesting debate in the comments.
Swearing makes code better
Fuck yeah quality fucking code!
Style guides for Google-originated open-source projects
Google's style guide for Python code. Obviously not the law, not even always a good suggestion, but worthy of consideration.
Textual 0.11.0 adds a beautiful Markdown widget
Reddit thread where the Textual Markdown widget was announced.
Also includes the rather hilarious comment "I wish there were more full blown app examples out there", back when Textual was pretty damn new and barely out of the initial "CSS branch" release.
Basic introduction to Pydantic
Nice little introduction to what Pydantic offers.
Bresenham's Circle Drawing Algorithm
Description of a method of drawing a circle
Text Editor Data Structures
Post about text editor data structures.
Writing Small CLI Programs in Common Lisp / Steve Losh
Common Lisp Nova Spec
A very clean presentation of the Common Lisp HyperSpec
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!)
Useful article talking about unicode stuff.
Page is annoying to read though with daft gimmicks.
Common Lisp: An interactive approach
Electronic book introducing Common Lisp.
My User Experience Porting Off setup.py
There seems to be a lot of confusion around setup.py and friends; and while I’ve seen pushback against this post (mostly sniffy gatekeeper stuff rather than helpful feedback), it’s a worthwhile read if only because the confusion is real.
Migrating from LSP-Mode to Eglot · Andrey Listopadov
Useful article talking about migrating from LSP mode to eglot in Emacs.
A Journey Into Shaders
An introduction to shaders.
Genetic Algorithms for Evolution of QWOP Gaits
QWOP is a browser-based, 2-dimensional flash game in which the player controls an Olympic sprinter competing in a simulated 100-meter race. The goal of the game is to advance the runner to the end of the 100-meter race as quickly as possible using the Q, W, O, and P keys, which control the muscles in the sprinters legs. Despite the game simple controls and straightforward goal, it is renowned for its difficulty and unintuitive gameplay. In this paper, we attempt to automatically discover effective QWOP gaits. We describe a programmatic interface developed to play the game, and we introduce several variants of a genetic algorithm tailored to solve this problem. We present experimental results on the effectiveness of various representations, initialization strategies, evolution paradigms, and parameter control mechanisms.
Context Free Art
Context Free is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.
Terminal Emulators Battle Royale – Unicode Edition!
It turns out that Unicode support in Terminals is a lot more difficult than it first appears. A quick overview of special support for Unicode characters in Terminals:
- "Wide" or "Fullwidth" characters, particularly for East Asian languages and emojis, are codepoints that occupy two cells in a terminal instead of one.
- "Zero" width combining characters used in languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, or Hindi do not occupy any cells themselves; instead, they modify the previous character.
- "Zero Width Joiner" (ZWJ U+200D) reduces and combines many codepoints into a single emoji. This is similar to combining, but encoded in a completely different way.
- "Variation Selector-16" (VS-16 U+FE0F) is a special character that, for specific "Narrow" emojis consuming one cell, causes them to become "Wide", consuming two cells.
Using the Hacker News API
Blog post going over the main details of the Hacker News API (possibly one of the worst APIs I've ever seen).
HackerNews/API: Documentation and Samples for the Official HN API
The official documentation for the v0 version of the HackerNews API.
HN Search API
An alternative API for HackerNews; one that looks way easier to work with and way more efficient.
Parallel httpx requests
Useful overview of how to perform parallel requests with httpx.
Hexcodle | The Daily Hexcode Guessing Game!
While it's fairly trivial to beat in a number of different ways, it's a fun idea.
niquests - A requests fork
Requests but with HTTP/3, HTTP/2, Multiplexed Connections, System CAs, Certificate Revocation, DNS over HTTPS / TLS / QUIC or UDP, Async, DNSSEC, and (much) pain removed!
Annotating args and kwargs in Python
Useful blog post that goes over the best ways to type *args and **kwargs in Python.
Python Packaging, One Year Later: A Look Back at 2023 in Python Packaging
How to improve Python packaging, or why fourteen tools are at least twelve too many
"Join me on a journey through packaging in Python and elsewhere. We’ll start by describing the classic packaging stack (involving setuptools and friends), the scientific stack (with conda), and some of the modern/alternate tools, such as Pipenv, Poetry, Hatch, or PDM. We’ll also look at some examples of packaging and dependency-related workflows seen elsewhere (Node.js and .NET). We’ll also take a glimpse at a possible future (with a venv-less workflow with PDM), and see if the PyPA agrees with the vision and insights of eight thousand users."
Running Open Genera 2.0 on Linux
A guide (that, as per the into, is now kind of old) to getting Open Genera running on GNU/Linux.
Common Lisp's BLOCK / RETURN-FROM and UNWIND-PROTECT
A nice description of how Common Lisp implements non-local flow control.
A Deep Dive into the SIGTTIN / SIGTTOU Terminal Access Control Mechanism in Linux
Useful deep dive into all the issues relating to job control and how it affects a running process.
A Tour of the Lisps
A pretty comprehensive tour of the main Lisps in play as of the end of 2023.