August 29, 2021

Post of the Week 2021-08-29

Just the act of measuring something can change outcomes. I love the reference to Jespen. https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/

August 22, 2021

Interpreter in Go - 3

A lexer takes the source code, a sequence of characters, and group them into tokens. e.g., it makes the first decision on how to process the strings 100-10, -100-10, and -100--100 into groups. I’m going to call this grouping “tokenization” even though I may be misusing the term. Tokenizing source code is hard. How should -100--100 be tokenized? Should it be a literal -100 followed by the minus token, followed by another -100?

July 29, 2021

Interpreter in Go - 2

Writing an Interpreter In Go by Thorsten Ball will be my personal introduction to writing an interpreter. I’ve never taken a comp sci class before, so I know nothing about compilers. On a lark, I decided to explore this area now, nearly 20 years after I started to learn computer programming. If you are interested in this book as well, you might might the AST Explorer a useful companion. I was told as some point in the past, that compilation can be broken down into four stages:

July 27, 2021

Interpreter in Go - 1

It happened. At the recommendation of https://twitter.com/dgryski, I bought Writing an Interpreter In Go. This will be my next hobby project. It’ll be interesting to see if I ever finish it.

July 25, 2021

Post of the Week 2021-07-25

Back from a long vacation. This week, we have folk wisdom on visual programming https://drossbucket.com/2021/06/30/hacker-news-folk-wisdom-on-visual-programming/

June 3, 2021

Post of the Week 2021-06-03

Humans and incentives, and why some metrics (or objectives and key results) should not be public. http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/06/01/count/

May 29, 2021

Post of the Week 2021-05-27

Systemd, the good parts https://lobste.rs/s/po98o2/systemd_good_parts

May 16, 2021

Post of the Week 2021-05-13

My thoughts today led me to reading about nuclear wastes. It turns out that what we call “nuclear waste” is a pretty vague term. A light-water reactor generates different kind of “waste” from a molten salt reactor. A traditional light-water reactor doesn’t consume fuel efficiently. It leaves behing partially consumed fuel that is not economically attractive to refine for further use. These partially spent rods continue to generate heat and are sometimes stored in cooling pools.

May 4, 2021

Post of the Week 2021-04-06

Grammar visualizer https://dundalek.com/grammkit/ Which leads to a JS parser generator https://pegjs.org/online And also leads to a JS parser generator with a visual debugger https://ohmlang.github.io/editor/ This also prompts my interest into a graphviz/dot parser https://github.com/awalterschulze/gographviz Which uses this Go parser generator https://github.com/goccmack/gocc This exploration also led me to this Go parser generator https://github.com/alecthomas/participle

May 3, 2021

Unit Tests vs Integration Tests

I used to favor automated integration testing. Now, I find myself walking away from it. I no longer find it worth the cost of setting up and maintaining such tests. I now rely mostly on unit testing. First, I need to define what I meant by those terms. In context of this post, unit tests In Wikipedia unit test integration test automated, not always not specified ranging from entire ‘module’ to an individual function modules tested as a group depends on execution conditions and testing procedures depends on unit test/implies modules are already unit tested From Martin Fowler