Programming

Like everyone else on the planet, I’ve been following GitHub Copilot since its launch. It is an impressive achievement and a remarkable milestone for the deep learning industry, that’s for sure. We are obviously at the early stages in deep learning applied to software development, and it is somewhat unsettling to ponder what the future might hold in this field. Like many others, however, I worry about code quality issues and the risk of license infringements1. I am also concerned that the advent of Copilot-like tools might fundamentally change the software developer experience, if not the software developer role as a whole, and for the worst. ...

I am pretty excited about the [Minimal APIs][3] feature that is coming with .NET 6. Three lines of code will be enough to build a fully functional REST microservice1: var app = WebApplication.Create(args); app.MapGet("/", () => "Hello World!"); await app.RunAsync(); If you’re a seasoned ASP.NET MVC/WebApi developer, the snippet caught your attention because, pre-.NET 6, achieving the same result will have you messing with a lot of extra cruft2. I suspect, however, that this feature is not primarily targeted at existing .NET developers. Developers new and old looking at .NET for the first time, or those like me returning after a long break; these are, I think, the designated audience. ...

When dealing with dictionaries, a typical problem is when an operation attempts to retrieve an element using a key that does not exist in the dictionary. In .NET, a KeyNotFoundException is raised, and that’s the desired behaviour in most circumstances. Sometimes, however, you know that your program will frequently try to retrieve keys that do not exist. In such cases, it is more efficient to use the TryGetValue method: This method returns the value associated with the specified key, if the key is found; otherwise, the default value for the type of the value parameter is returned (source) ...

My brilliant friend Salvatore Sanfilippo (otherwise known as antirez of Redis fame) has an interesting write-up on his website. How similar is programming to prose writing? After getting his own feet wet with novel writing, he is convinced that the two activities share many common traits. One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and writing novels have many common traits and similar processes. ...

Flask 2.0 has just been released. Along with it come many other major satellite releases: Werkzeug 2.0, Jinja 3.0, Click 8.0, ItsDangerous 2.0, and MarkupSafe 2.0. Across all projects, Python 3.6+ is now required, and comprehensive type annotations are supported. At a glance, I’d say that the biggest news is async views in Flask 2. Work has also been done around Werkzeug Request and Response classes to allow for better sync and async in the future (it’s not a public API yet.) Jinja, Click and ItsDangerous come with a lot of new niceties. Details are available on the Pallets website. ...

I am very late to the party, but today I learned that the good old dotnet SmptClient is considered obsolete and should not be used. Quoting the documentation: We don’t recommend using the SmtpClient class for new development because SmtpClient doesn’t support many modern protocols. Use MailKit or other libraries instead. (source) Interestingly, Microsoft is recommending a third-party open-source library as an alternative. I hope we’ll see more of that in the future. ...

Giulia got an exciting assignment from her teacher: Write a C program that simulates (a simplified version of) COVID outbreak spreading across a population of 200 people. When a healthy person comes into contact with a sick person, the healthy person becomes ill, too. After some time, a sick person will recover. A recovered person cannot infect a healthy person nor become sick again after coming in contact with a sick person. ...

When we talk about getting better at programming, we often talk about testing, writing reusable code, design patterns, and readability. All of those things are important. But in this blog post, I want to talk about a different way to get better at programming: learning how the systems you’re using work! This is the main way I approach getting better at programming. Once again, Julia Evans has great sensible advice up on her site. ...

Write libraries instead of services is an interesting article I read a while ago. I cannot get it off my head. In an attempt to clear up my mind, I decided to sit down and write about it. I have been writing libraries for a good part of my life. Most of my earlier dev-work resides on thousands of computers in the form of libraries. More recently, I have been writing and deploying remote services. Libraries versus Services is a topic I care about. ...

The always brilliant Hynek recently posted Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You. Primarily targeted at consumers of SemVer-versioned packages, it is full of insightful advice. From my perspective as an open-source maintainer, I can tell you that versioning is hard. Judging when a new release is going to break backward compatibility is not as simple as it might seem on the surface, and Hynek does a great job explaining why. Sometimes it is also hard for me to tell if a change in a codebase classifies as a new feature, small improvement, or fix—subtle differences. In the context of SemVer, it matters a lot because version numbers have a meaning. Consumers will likely decide whether to upgrade or not based on that meaning. ...