Imagine a bunch of wood chips randomly distributed on a surface. Now add an ant, randomly walking around amongst the chips. Whenever it bumps into a chip, the ant picks up the chip; if it bumps into another chip, it drops the one it is carrying and keeps walking.
How will such a system evolve over time?
A tool to display directory entries, sorted by size, together with their cumulative contribution to the total.
Go is weird. For all its intended (and frequently achieved) simplicity and straightforwardness, I keep being surprised by its rough edges and seemingly arbitrary corner cases. Here is one.
For every function, data type, or other such code artifact, there are two bits of code: the part that defines and implements it, and the one that uses it.
As I have been thinking (here and here) about the proper use and understanding of Go’s interface construct, the question came up, who is actually responsible for writing the interface: the person who defines the data type, or the person who uses it?
In response to a previous post, very insightfully, Steve Singer, pointed out that it is helpful to distinguish between three concepts, when talking about “interfaces” in general:
The interface construct in the Go language is one of its most immediately visible features. Interfaces in Go are ubiquitous, but I am afraid that the best way to use them has not yet fully been explored. Moreover, in practice, Go interfaces seem to be used in ways that were not intended, and are not necessarily entirely beneficial, such as an implementation shortcut to the classic Handle/Body idiom that hides interchangeable implementations behind a common, well, interface.
Like many other people, I have struggled with git. It was obviously all very clever, but somehow inexplicably difficult and frustrating to use.
Eventually, I realized that my difficulties stemmed from three misconceptions: areas, where git did something different from what I thought it did, or different from what I was led to believe it did.
Git has been around for going on 20 years, yet people still continue to write “getting-started” and “common-challenges” tutorials. This is mine.
How short can a complete, competitive sort algorithm be? Less than half a dozen lines? Maybe just 3 or 4?
They use a “real database”. They use “nice object-oriented libraries”. They use “nice C++ abstractions”. And quite frankly, as a result of all these design decisions that sound so appealing to some CS people, the end result is a horrible and unmaintainable mess.