A great small post python’s pre-declared constants are kinda weird examining Python’s constants. The interesting thing here is that the constants are not treated the same way and hence have slightly different behaviour. It’s a little hard to see how this came about. It’s relatively clear that there is no good reason for the constants to behave differently in this way and that the differences are likely an historical anomaly. ...
The Google developers blog has published a post Why Go is an Ideal Language for AI-Assisted Software Engineering. How to say this nicely, I don’t think much of this post. First of all, I think this is a great area of active research. Just as we aren’t terribly sure about what makes a good programming language for humans, we also do not know exactly what makes a good programming language for LLMs. It does seem that it is useful to have a lot of code from a programming language in the training data for an LLM, but I think that’s a slightly different (if more pragmatic) question than what makes a fundamentally good programming language for an LLM. But note also, if we determined some kind of fundamentally good programming language (even a new one) for an LLM we could probably get over the lack of training data in several ways. ...
In a somewhat non-specific titled blog post: What’s the best programming language for coding agents?, Dan Luu takes the time to actually investigate the question of which programming languages are more efficient in their token usage. Well technically the token usage of LLM models when writing in those programming languages. Primarily he’s interested in the claims that dynamic programming languages are more token efficient because the model needn’t write any type annotations. He is skeptical and I think the skepticism is warranted: ...
Self-recommending absolutely bangning post from Simon Willison regarding combining HTML, Javascript, and CSS into a single file, which can then be served on static hosting. The post itself is obviously worth reading, but additionally you can browse his extensive collection of HTML tools: You can explore my collection on tools.simonwillison.net—the by month view is useful for browsing the entire collection. Some excellent tips including a collection of API resources that provide open CORS headers (which means you will be able to call the API from your HTML file hosted on a different domain name to the API). ...
Lovely blog post from Herman who operates the bear blog blogging service. He details a little project of his to mess with the badly behaving bots, but I think it also works well as a read of simply spending some time going down a rabbit hole, mostly enjoying oneself, and also reflecting a little. He is concerned mostly with the real bad-folk of the Internet, the ones that are looking for exploits: ...
Syntax highlighting is having something of a moment. Three posts have popped up on my feed: Niki is sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong Words and Buttons speak about Lexical differential highlighting Hillel Wayne complains that Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel. Sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong In the first post Niki allows themselves to wander a little from the main point with several interesting syntax-highlighting related points. However, I think the main point is made with: ...
An interesting post on the Unplanned Obsolescence blog.I’ve asked before what dynamically typed languages are good for and one answer I’ve come up with is meta-programming. In the linked post the answer is essentially ‘glue’ code. It is very much worth reading the entire thing, but the author is firstly making the claim that you should mostly stick to using the web DSLs, rather than language extensions/frameworks that seek to abstract away from those DSLs. The DSLs in question are HTML, CSS, and SQL. The author then states, that when you have to glue between these DSLs in your general purpose programming language you are necessarily crossing type boundaries, as a result, you mostly lose the guarantees of a statically typed language, but that statically typed language forces you through some hoops which ultimately obscures the actual logic of what you’re attempting to achieve. ...
A couple of weeks back after the GPT-5 release, I wrote a skeptical post that the fact that the GPT-5 model picker release was botched was something of a bearish sign for llm-assisted programming: Okay, but if OpenAI cannot utilise their own models in coding/dev-ops to avoid a high-profile failure on a very high importance launch, what chance do other companies have? Why hasn’t the A.I. enabled OpenAI to improve their development/deployment strategies to avoid such techincal glitches? ...
A good summation post perfect web app from Matyáš Racek’s blog yoyo-code. I think this neatly sums up how difficult it is to write a good, well working web application. It’s good to have all this in one place. In particular I think this nicely shows some of the trade-offs between traditional server-side rendered multi-page applications and client-side rendered single-page applications. For example: It [the app] should work in a limited way offline. and The app should work without JavaScript enabled (progressive enhancement) Those are both not straightforward on their own, and pretty difficult to achieve both at the same time. ...