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…