Viewing profile — peterevans

Assembly is a type of programming that is unlike most programming languages, and as such, would be a really tough introduction to the field. Can you explain a bit more about how yo…

The original magic system from Final Fantasy 1 (you can only cast N spells per magic level, maximum of 9) is a copy of the system from Wizardry. The only difference you have to typ…

Freshpaint is hiring! We're a YC- and Intel-backed company SaaS platform that provides a codeless customer data platform that is default-safe for companies that need to work with s…

I like the idea of deliberate learning! I also really like the idea of focusing on how to maximize the amount of learning you do, and choosing when to strategically focus on that. …

A lot of advice I've seen (such as this) postdates much of the standard library implementation by quite a bit. I could not, however, suggest that the current design for crypt is go…

Abstractions are not a bad thing, but early abstraction often lacks understanding of the problem to solve. Abstraction is complexity. We often need complexity, but we should not ad…

It would be neat if MachineBox could sense whether log noise would be useful in other contexts--e.g., as a metric that can be graphed. Or whether your logging is lacking something …

I mean, I guess it's the best thing if you want to wreak havoc and chaos? Which, perhaps, you do! Your suggested dichotomy is, of course, a little bit false. But I'm sure you knew …

The main issue is that there's already a lot of standard library support for classical strings--things that are just a pointer to a chunk of bytes, and no more; rewriting those fun…

I highly recommend the Static Analyzer that clang already uses. I use this frequently in the C project I am currently working on, and it's very good at spotting memory leaks and ot…

Ah-ha, well! There are actually two Apple IIe models. (Well, there was a third "platinum" one too, but let's not talk about that.) One would have shown "Apple ][" at boot time, and…

My understanding is that in the 6502 (NMOS) chip, those other opcodes had undefined behavior, and you might crash if you executed one. So you'd need to know who was the manufacture…

JWTs are really not a good idea for session storage. I wouldn't consider them secure by any stretch. ElastiCache would be a much better option, and relatively straightforward to co…

I suppose time will tell whether generics are added or not. I'm--not exactly buying your argument that Go's compiler is badly written, or itself the reason that generics can't be a…

Sort of--you get dynamic types, so you can stuff whatever you want into your collections. You can do that in Go, too--just use interface{}. Sadly, that has not quieted the Generics…

Huge caveat: This article was written in 2012 . So do yourself and fellow reader a favor and not argue over content that is now six years-old. Obviously, Go has not replaced C++ us…

Expressiveness is not always a pure ideal; reducing your business logic to two lines of code comes with tradeoffs. The ways your code work within the frameworks you choose is not a…

"Almost never." In my experience, the code you write within a third-party framework rarely works the way you expect it to the first time. So you often do "debug" the framework, jus…

To me, this essay read more like a troll; a mish-mash of complaints and anecdotes that don't frankly make any sense when put together. But the author succeeded in getting to the fi…

I recall reading something from some of the language developers who had indicated that their worry with generics was whether they could do it right. I inferred that to mean, whethe…

I am afraid I don't exactly agree. If you are publishing a library, for one, it's best not to include any vendored dependencies to begin with. But, ideally, no one should include v…

I'm really excited about all this! No more GOPATH, no need for vendor directories; I think this is a positive step forward for Go, and package management in general. I'm also inter…

As I said: gofmt is not a pretty printer. It may help if you decouple the goal (increased readability of code) and the action (application of a style to code). Pretty printers—and …