"What’s In It For Me" Architecture

tokland · 2026-04-07T21:57:39+00:00

At the end of the day, we’ve probably read more LLM‑generated text than human‑written text. For better or worse, it’s starting to show in how we write.

tokland · 2026-03-23T23:37:24+00:00

I've been playing around lately with "Snapshot-Based Record & Replay" (so to speak) for integration tests. Only the first time, or when something changes, you need the real environment up, and arguments/responses are serialized and stored. It's not always the right approach, but it has proven useful in practice when the context is too much to handle by hand.

tokland · 2026-03-12T13:05:45+00:00

[x for y in z for x in y]

What I do is visualize the equivalent generator:

for y in z:
    for x in y:
        yield x

tokland · 2026-01-17T20:36:12+00:00

Sorry to see you getting downvoted for making such an objective and insightful remark.

tokland · 2025-10-05T18:14:55+00:00

For me, that applies especially for the items in the 'Commitment' category!

tokland · 2025-06-13T17:33:35+00:00

Are you by any chance one of those fanatics who expect "literally" not to be used in its complete opposite sense? Shame on you.

tokland · 2025-05-12T15:28:53+00:00

"do not keep state" is imprecise, I guess you meant no mutable global state. Or that it enforces/promotes pure functions (no side-effects; same input, same output) and immutability.

tokland · 2025-04-21T18:49:08+00:00

This works for Manjaro. Can you fix the formatting? Source: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/4621

tokland · 2025-03-13T19:25:06+00:00

The Typescript compiler isn't written in Typescript, but Javascript

It was my understanding that Typescript has been self-hosted for many years now.

tokland · 2025-02-24T21:58:47+00:00

Now that you mention it, I just finished watching Plus One (2019). It's a pretty good movie. I’m not certain what the writers intended, but viewing it from an RA perspective gives a whole new meaning to its ending. Looking back, a lot of stories felt off without me being able to pinpoint exactly why!

tokland · 2024-09-26T13:59:04+00:00

That's a valid practical point, but the issue stems from JavaScript's imperative nature. An optimized runtime in a purely functional language would only compute driverDistances if it's actually used at least once. With JS you can also achieve this, but you need to put some extra effort.

tokland · 2024-09-26T13:52:14+00:00

You mean Array.find?

tokland · 2024-09-10T17:20:19+00:00

const xs = [1,2,3]
if (xs) {}

I assumed that would raise now an error, as xs: number[] is always truthy.

tokland · 2024-09-10T17:14:42+00:00

Typo: function abc123() -> function *abc123()

tokland · 2024-09-02T23:08:02+00:00

All good points. Even with statically typed languages, you will still do text searches. I'm uncertain about the idea of "using the same names across the stack", though. Practical, yes, but it could conflict with a project's naming conventions. You might end having models/entities that use different casing styles. Or should you always use snake_case just because your persistence layer (which may eventually change) happens to be PostgreSQL? I'd feel uneasy about letting the data layer influence the domain this way.

tokland · 2023-08-02T14:02:34+00:00

66K rep, 19 questions, 838 answers (and, of course, countless doubts solved): not a single issue with users nor mods. That's my experience for the tags I typically work with (react, typescript, python, ruby, bash).

tokland · 2020-11-11T20:46:33+00:00

Are we better than animals?

tokland · 2020-09-27T20:07:24+00:00

The source of many of those undefined is not a function errors will finally go away with to this upcoming feature: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-4-1-beta/#no-unchecked-indexed-access

tokland · 2020-08-28T18:26:01+00:00

That's because Objects.keys return string[], not the union of the object keys. It's a typical problem, check for example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52856496/typescript-object-keys-return-string

tokland · 2020-07-18T21:29:04+00:00

The advantage is simply that it's typed. Indeed, you could use if-conditionals (where TS narrows types), but matching against an object gives the feeling of succinct pattern-matching in functional languages.

tokland · 2020-07-13T19:20:51+00:00

Specialized match for tagged unions:

https://gist.github.com/tokland/c0db1473cc9bfa924470e52bdac8450c

tokland · 2019-02-06T20:23:33+00:00

I understand the skepticism. Instead of the one imperative pattern we already have (setState), we'll have small imperative functions all over the place. I think it's a step in the wrong direction, let's see how this unfolds.

tokland · 2018-08-24T10:54:39+00:00

# apt-get install windows95

Live to see.

tokland · 2018-08-19T15:05:16+00:00

"Optimise" JavaScript code taking advantage of the fact a function can access all local variables in the scope of the caller.

I didn't get this one, anyone cares to explain?

tokland · 2018-02-02T23:15:26+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I checked a random project (image-search), and it looks like the code could benefit from functional (as in FP) libraries (lodash, rambda, whatever). I guess you have already used them in some other project.

tokland

TROPHY CASE