o11c

@o11c@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I accidentally removed the WHERE clause from my SQL query in a personal tool. Every row is now the same. I lost everything, have no backup, and I'm stupid.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is about the one thing where SQL is a badly designed language, and you should use a frontend that forces you to write your queries in the order (table, filter, columns) for consistency.

  UPDATE table_name WHERE y = $3 SET w = $1, x = $2, z = $4 RETURNING *
  FROM table_name SELECT w, x, y, z
  

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do y'all think about mailing lists and IRC as sole communication channels?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with mailing lists is that no mailing list provider ever supports “subscribe to this message tree”.

  As a result, either you get constant spam, or you don’t get half the replies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your most obscure binding?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately both of those are used in common English or computer words. The only letter pairs not used are: bq, bx, cf, cj, dx, fq, fx, fz, hx, jb, jc, jf, jg, jq, jv, jx, jz, kq, kz, mx, px, qc, qd, qg, qh, qj, qk, ql, qm, qn, qp, qq, qr, qt, qv, qx, qy, qz, sx, tx, vb, vc, vf, vj, vm, vq, vw, vx, wq, wx, xj, zx.

  Personally I have mappings based on ``, and press it twice to get a real newline.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux Terminal Emulators Have The Potential Of Being Much Faster⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  True, speed does matter somewhat. But even if xterm isn’t the ultimate in speed, it’s pretty good. Starts up instantly (the benefit of no extraneous libraries); the worst question is if it’s occasionally limited to the framerate for certain output patterns, and if there’s a clog you can always minimize it for a moment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux Terminal Emulators Have The Potential Of Being Much Faster⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Speed is far from the only thing that matters in terminal emulators though. Correctness is critical.

  The only terminals in which I have any confidence of correctness are xterm and pangoterm. And I suppose technically the BEL-for-ST extension is incorrect even there, but we have to live with that and a workaround is available.

  A lot of terminal emulators end up hard-coding a handful of common sequences, and fail to correctly ignore sequences they don’t implement. And worse, many go on to implement sequences that cannot be correctly handled.

  One simple example that usually fails: \e!!F. More nasty, however, are the ones that ignore intermediaries and execute some unrelated command instead.

  I can’t be bothered to pick apart specific terminals anymore. Most don’t even know what an IR is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Help] what's one of the easier ways to make a window on linux using x11 and nasm assembly?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with XCB is that it’s designed to be efficient, not easy. If you’re avoiding toolkits for some reason, “so what if I block the world” may be a reasonable tradeoff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Help] what's one of the easier ways to make a window on linux using x11 and nasm assembly?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  1, Don’t target X11 specifically these days. Yes a lot of people still use it or at least support it in a backward-compatible manner, but Wayland is only increasing.

  2, Don’t fear the use of libraries. SDL and GTK, being C-based, should both be feasible from assembly; at most you might want to build a C program that dumps constants (if -dM doesn’t suffice) and struct offsets (if you don’t want to hard-code them).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hello from the other side⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Even logging can sometimes be enough to hide the heisgenbug.

  Logging to a file descriptor can sometimes be avoided by logging to memory (which for crash-safety includes the possibility of an mmap’ed file, since the kernel will just take care of them as long as the whole system doesn’t go down). But logging from every thread to a single section of memory can also be problematic (even without mutexes, atomics can be expensive and certainly have side-effects) - sometimes you need a separate per-thread log, and combine in the log-reader tool.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Every Single Freaking Time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t remember the last time I used ctrl-C. It’s always select or "+y.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which side are you? Javascript or Typescript⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t managed to break into the JS-adjacent ecosystem, but tooling around Typescript is definitely a major part of the problem:

  • following a basic tutorial somehow ended up spending multiple seconds just to transpile and run “Hello, World!”.
  • there are at least 3 different ways of specifying the files and settings you want to use, and some of them will cause others to be ignored entirely, even though it looks like they should be used.
  • embracing duck typing means many common type errors simply cannot be caught. Also that means dynamic type checks are impossible, even though JS itself supports them (admittedly with oddities, e.g. with string vs String).
  • there are at least 3 incompatible ways to define and use a “module”, and it’s not clear what’s actually useful or intended to be used, or what the outputs are supposed to be for different environments.

  At this point I’m seriously considering writing my own sanelanguage-to-JS transpiler or using some other one (maybe Haxe? but I’m not sure its object model allows full performance tweaking), because I’ve written literally dozens of other languages without this kind of pain.

  WASM has its own problems (we shouldn’t be quick to call asm.js obsolete … also, C’s object model is not what people think it is) but that’s another story.

  ---

  At this point, I’d be happy with some basic code reuse. Have a “generalized fibonacci” module taking 3 inputs, and call it 3 ways: from a web browser on the client side, as a web browser request to server (which is running nodejs), or as a nodejs command-line program. Transpiling one of the callers should not force the others to be transpiled, but if multiple of the callers need to be transpiled at once, it should not typecheck the library internals multiple times. I should also be able to choose whether to produce a “dynamic” library (which can be recompiled later without recompiling the dependencies) or a “static” one (only output a single merged file), and whether to minify.

  I’m not sure the TS ecosystem is competent enough to deal with this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it really a breaking change if a method changes output after an update?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  As a practical matter it is likely to break somebody’s unit tests.

  If there’s an alternative approach that you want people to use in their unit tests, go ahead and break it. If there isn’t, but you’re only doing such breakage rarely and it’s reasonable for their unit tests to be updated in a way that works with both versions of your library, do it cautiously. Otherwise, only do it if you own the universe and you hate future debuggers.