Almost all of these are irrelevant in the age of AI, except for the logarithm thing
Small programming tricks
31–40 of 187 posts
Re: Small programming tricks
#32Only a few of these are actual programming tricks. The problem with sharing them is that they'll typically seem obvious to you, since you know them. It's difficult to know what is actually unknown to other people, and if you share stuff everybody knows you risk coming off as arrogant. Here's one that I think more people should know: avoid branches. If I can do the same thing without an if statement and even a logical…
A (hopefully interesting) aside about avoiding branches is if you don't need an exact answer but need your code to make a decision based on an approximation over some known range, you can employ a basic fuzzy logic method. Serially add, subtract, or multiply to adjust a value by a handful of weighted inputs then use that value instead of branching repeatedly to choose the right action. You might branch once based on the final value where it would have otherwise been a larger tree of decisions. In fortuitous situations, you may avoid branching altogether.
Re: Small programming tricks
#33You might not need find due to advanced globs, but it's too easy to run into expansion limits when you match hundreds or thousands of files, so you're back to find for that.
Re: Small programming tricks
#34> At a previous company, I shared a trick on slack every day with the engineering team, both technical and company-specific, and folks found them pretty useful. I would find that annoying, however to not be seen as a jerk I wouldn't say anything.
s/seen as//
Annoyance is a clue; not about them, but about you.
Re: Small programming tricks
#35Another one I use often is | pbcopy on macOS. Pipes the the result directly into your clipboard
Re: Small programming tricks
#36I find myself using ctrl-r less and less as I make sure that anything of value that I work out goes into a Makefile or the app tooling, for me this is the basis of the dev-ops approach to work (make sure everything is scripted, not worked out on the fly).
Ctrl+r is great, sometimes. History saving sucks which can make using it difficult, but i usually use it out of laziness than trying to recall a command, especially with ssh or repeated iterations requiring flipping between two settings/states. Its hard to rely on it for other things, but its still super useful.
Re: Small programming tricks
#37`find` does a lot more things than that.
Re: Small programming tricks
#38A lot more tricks can be learned from just watching AI work. Instead of allowing AI to work autonomously, go back to the old days where you manually approve every command the AI runs. Just recently while doing performance optimization work, I found Opus using the `perf` command in ways I didn’t know possible. Just give AI a real task and carefully read what commands are used by the AI to solve the problem; most likely the AI uses a trick or two that you didn’t know existed.
Re: Small programming tricks
#39This reminded me to ask: To what extent are people still coding by hand these days? In my profession (academia), literally no one codes anymore. On one hand, it sucks because the joy and fun of programming has been replaced by constant agent orchestration tasks, but on the other hand, it's hard to go back to the way things were before because the productivity gain is so good. I remember learning a lot of these progra…
While I mostly just do AI-assisted coding at work nowadays, after a long time yesterday I did some scripting in a python REPL on a remote server which didn't have any AI tooling. It felt rewarding. I was also surprised my programming muscle memory was still alive and kicking.
Re: Small programming tricks
#40I find myself using ctrl-r less and less as I make sure that anything of value that I work out goes into a Makefile or the app tooling, for me this is the basis of the dev-ops approach to work (make sure everything is scripted, not worked out on the fly).
I’m lazy so With fish, I just type a part of the command and press up few times to get to where I want. There’s also fish-fzf.