I’ve spent the last several days unravelling the mystery of the Each feature in Fuse. It’s a powerhouse feature that has managed to accumulate a fair share of technical debt. Though in […]
Innocent growth of technical debt
Debugging a defect with a shared argument
While writing some error handling helpers, during my algorithm stream, I encountered a defect. It’s a tricky one dealing with the passing of shared arguments to functions in Leaf. After a lot […]
Should function arguments be reassignable or mutable?
Working on a defect in Leaf I had a question: should function arguments be reassignable within a function? Are they just like local variables, or should they be treated specially? It would […]
Interview Question: A two-player card game
I’ve been asking interviewees, over at interviewing.io, to write a simulation of a two-player card game. It’s an engaging question, revealing a lot about their abilities. It doesn’t involve any trickery nor […]
Are global variables bad?
We hear it often, “global variables are bad, avoid using them!” But is this actually good advice? Simplified blanket statements are already a bit suspicious, but if we get into the details […]
What is a closure?
You’ve heard the term, you’ve probably even used them, but what exactly is a closure? It’s a combination of data and code that have become a staple of modern programming. They offer […]
Hidden complexity in cute animal pictures
You head over to your favourite link site and click one of the pictures — or let’s be honest, you ctrl+click all the pictures. Your browser is filled with tabs of cute […]
Adding += and friends to Leaf
Yesterday I finished a rather simple Kata from Codewars: the sum of a sequence of numbers. It was straight forward to implement, but I felt like it was missing something. It looked […]
Why I’m not a fan of pair programming
Pair programming feels like a lingering ghost. Its adherents proclaim it to be the best approach to coding while the rest of us just continue to ignore it. I’ve only tried it […]
What is reactive and stream programming?
Reactive programming is a paradigm that creates permanent relationships between values. Rather than one-time calculations, a reactive expression updates its result whenever the source value changes. Perhaps first popularized in spreadsheets, and […]
Debugging a synchronous callback in loop defect
A bug snuck by me while adding a new feature to Each: a behaviour in Fuse that dynamically adds UI elements. I had to change a lot of the code, so I […]
What is declarative programming?
Declarative programming is a paradigm that expresses the desired result, not how to achieve it. It uses rules and constraints to describe a user interface, the layout of a network, the structure […]
Embedding a text file in C++ code (with Scons)
I needed a way to embed a text file in my C++ code. I recently introduced Leaf code into the Leaf compiler and didn’t want to depend on a file dependency at […]
I’m proud to be a programmer
I’m a programmer. If you think that means I write code, you’re wrong. As a programmer, my job is translating ideas into a working computer solution. Beyond coding, this involves a myriad […]
