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2024-12-27

The Curious Case of Quentell

I go on a journey to learn about a man named Quentell, and discover unsettling things about the information landscape.

2024-12-11

Rust has some really nice functional programming facilities built in, all around an iterator concept. Rust being focused on performance and low level control makes it possible to use this without paying a performance cost. Sometimes I still prefer to use the humble for loop though. In quite a few cases, it combines high performance with high readability. I thought I'd motivate why. …

2024-12-11

The Humble For Loop in JavaScript

programming javascript

I've seen some programmers try to avoid the humble for loop at all costs, in favor of more functional abstractions. I'm going to argue that the for loop is sometimes simply the best option. That doesn't mean you should always use it -- far from it -- but it does mean you should give it due consideration. The goal is to help develop some intuitions about this topic. I talk about readability of code in this post, but I also talk about performance. My argument will be that there are cases where the for loop combines readability with performance. I'm focusing on JavaScript as the example language, but it can stand in for many languages with similar characteristics like Python and Ruby. But the culture of JavaScript leans more towards functional programming patterns than these other languages, so I think it's the appropriate language to highlight. …

2024-11-22

Don't Look Down on Print Debugging

programming

Print good, not bad!

2024-11-19

Question Best Practices

programming

In software development we have best practices. These are the distilled wisdom of software engineering, and you should follow best practices to be a good software developer, and to develop good software. If someone points out you broke them, that should be sufficient to make you mend your ways. This is what the term "best practices" implies to me . There are different, more subtle interpretations, but I think this interpretation is a reasonable one and in actual usage. Let's go into its problems. …