TL;DR

• Computer programmers expect their language environments to reject bad programs. It’s largely done with lightweight formal methods.
• Runtime monitoring (the thing that tells you that undefined is not a funciton) is an example of such a formal method.
• A type system is also an example of such a formal method.
• …

Published on Fri, Apr 09, 2021, by doma team, working from Bristol, UK.

TL;DR

When to resort to shell scripts:

• Portability is important
• Problem at hand is compact
• File system interaction
• Command-line program automation

When to search for an alternative

• Extensibility is required
• Coding mission-critical stuff

Shell scripting is dangerous, use…

Published on Tue, Mar 30, 2021 by doma team, working from Bristol, UK.

TL;DR

• Don’t use regular expressions for parsing
• Parser combinators are a way to construct composable computations with higher-order functions
• Parser combinators are easy to use to get results quickly
• They are sufficient for 99% of pragmatic uses, falling…

TL;DR

Rust

• Rust is an imperative language that has the most pattern-related language facilities
• Rust has both shallow destructuring and deep destructuring
• if let matching form can be utilised to alleviate Rust’s lack of multiple-head functions

JavaScript

• JavaScript has a lot of pattern-related language features:
• Position-based destructuring for arrays and key-based for objects
• …

From CSV to XML to JSON, humans sure love their structured data. Computers like it too. If you think about it, X86 assembly is not much more than a structured data format. So is true for ELF, dwarf, protobuf…

PNGs, JPEGs and even MySQL database files are all structured binary…