I’ve used MATLAB for over 25 years. (And before that, I even used MATRIXx, a late, unlamented attempt at a spinoff, or maybe a ripoff.) It’s not the first language I learned to program in, but it’s the one that I came of age with mathematically. Knowing MATLAB has been very good to my career.
However, it’s impossible to ignore the rise of Python in scientific computing. MathWorks must feel the same way: not only did they add the ability to call Python directly from within MATLAB, but they’ve adopted borrowed some of its language features, such as more aggressive broadcasting for operands of binary operators.

I have a saying that summarizes my opinion of Rust compared to Go: “Go is the result of C programmers designing a new programming language, and Rust is the result of C++ programmers designing a new programming language”. This isn’t just a metaphor - Go was designed by plan9 alumni, an operating system written in C and the source of inspiration for many of Go’s features, and Rust was designed by the folks at Mozilla - whose flagship product is one of the largest C++ codebases in the world.

This is a long-term project to decode all of the GNU coreutils in version 8.3.

This resource is for novice programmers exploring the design of command-line utilities. It is best used as an accompaniment providing useful background while reading the source code of the utility you may be interested in. This is not a user guide -- Please see applicable man pages for instructions on using these utilities.

Awk is a very nice language with a very strange name. In this first article of a three-part series, Daniel Robbins will quickly get your awk programming skills up to speed. As the series progresses, more advanced topics will be covered, culminating with an advanced real-world awk application demo.

Snap! is a broadly inviting programming language for kids and adults that’s also a platform for serious study of computer science.

Snap! is now a community website where you can share and publish projects so others can find and remix them, and where you can ask questions and discuss the beauty and joy of computing. We invite you to check out the new site. Did you know that you can embed Snap! projects in other web pages?

We've also enhanced the programming language, making it easier to discover and to use powerful blocks for analyzing data and transforming media.

V is a programming language that has been hyped a lot. As it’s recently had its first alpha release, I figured it would be a good idea to step through it and see if it lives up to the promises that the author has been claiming for months.

As far as I can tell, all of the above features are either “work-in-progress” or completely absent from the source repository.

What does debugging a program look like?

Simple, fast, safe, compiled programming language.

Nice approach. Still not mature.

StackOverflow is the de facto standard place to go when you need to figure out how to do something as a programmer. A web search for information about how to check the number of lines in a file using the C programming language will probably give you StackOverflow questions as the most relevant search results. Unfortunately, while writing good, clean, reliable C does not need to be difficult, it is certainly difficult to find information about how to do it well, and the people answering these questions on StackOverflow are not filtered by their skills or knowledge of good practices. From time to time, the top-rated answer or the accepted answer is even the worst answer that addresses the question.

The best example I have seen of a straightforward line count algorithm is in a place that might seem obvious after the fact: the source code of the wc command line utility. Figure out how the -l option is handled in a good implementation of wc, and all that's left is to adapt it to your needs. Ideally, the solution you find should be short, simple, careful (e.g. checking for error conditions), robust, well-worn, and well-formatted.

The C coding standards of the OpenBSD community are among the highest and most pragmatic you'll ever find, and when someone makes a decision about implementation whose reasoning is not pretty obvious in the code itself you're almost certain to see that reasoning clearly documented in code comments, which can also teach you something about being a good programmer in general.

I like Python, but wish it had static typing. The added safety would go a long way to improving quality and reducing development time. So today I tried to make use of type annotations and a static …

SCons is an Open Source software construction tool - that is, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.

We wish to take an array of 32 million 64bit floating point values, and compute the sum of their squares. This will let us explore some fundamental abilities of various languages. Their ability to iterate over arrays efficiently, whether they can vectorize basic loops, and whether higher order functions like map and reduce compile to efficient code. When applicable, I will show runtimes of both map and reduce, so we get insight into whether the language can stream higher order functions together, and also the runtime with a single reduce or fold operation.

I marker this article as "funny" since I can not believe it is serious. Or at least I'm missing something...

We often have to write code using  permissive programming languages like C and C++. They tend to generate hard-to-debug problems that can crash your applications. Thankfully, many compilers offer “sanitizers”. I discussed them in my post No more leaks with sanitize flags in gcc and clang. I strongly encourage the use of sanitizers as I think it is the modern way to write C and C++. When many people describe how impossibly difficult it is to build good software in C and C++, they often think about old-school bare metal C and C++ where the code do all sorts of mysterious things without any protection. Then they feel compelled to run their code in a debugger and to manually run through it. You should not write code this way! Get some tools! Sanitizers can catch undefined behaviour, memory leaks, buffer overflows, data races, and so forth.

Which built-ins should you know about?

I estimate most Python developers will only ever need about 30 built-in functions, but which 30 depends on what you’re actually doing with Python.

We’re going to take a look at all 69 of Python’s built-in functions, in a birds eye view sort of way.

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Vim 8.1 was released about a year ago, in May 2018. The “main new feature” was official support for running a terminal within vim. Along with this came a built-in debugger plugin, termd…

Interesting consideration on the usage of setvbuf in a C program.

I do the bulk of my code reviews from the command line, especially when reviewing larger changes. I've built up a number of tools and config settings …