https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/fringetech/ Recent content in Fringetech on Hillel Wayne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/frink/ Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/frink/ One day Alan Eliasen read a fart joke and got so mad he invented a programming language. 20 years later Frink is one of the best special purpose languages for dealing with units. “But why do we need a language just for dealing with units?” Glad you asked! Intro to Units A unit is the physical property a number represents, like distance or time. We almost always are talking about SI units, or Système international. https://www.hillelwayne.com/negatypes/ Thu, 26 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/negatypes/ Back in 2007 Python added Abstract Base Classes, which were intended to be used as interfaces: from abc import ABC class AbstractIterable(ABC): @abstractmethod def __iter__(self): while False: yield None def get_iterator(self): return self.__iter__() ABCs were added to strengthen the duck typing a little. If you inherited AbstractIterable, then everybody knew you had an implemented __iter__ method, and could handle that appropriately. Unsurprisingly, this idea never caught on. People instead prefered “better ask forgiveness than permission” and wrapped calls to __iter__ in a try block. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/metamorphic-testing/ Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/metamorphic-testing/ Confession: I read the ACM Magazine. This makes me a dweeb even in programming circles. One of the things I found in it is “Metamorphic Testing”. I’ve never heard of it, and nobody I knew heard about it either. But the academic literature was shockingly impressive: many incredibly successful case studies in wildly different fields. So why haven’t we heard of it before? There’s only one article anywhere targeted at people outside academia.