A programming-theory essay pushes back on the claim that any threaded function argument, such as Go's context.Context, qualifies as a 'function color' like async/await. The author argues that if every parameter counted as a color, the concept wouldn't have needed inventing decades after functions themselves existed, and proposes analyzing coloring instead as a question of how a change to one function propagates through the call graph to its callers.
jerf.org
· 2026-09-08
A software developer recounts how a fascination with building things from scratch drew them into programming, initially learning PHP, HTML and CSS to create back-end systems and websites. Over time, the writer says the appeal shifted from the act of coding itself toward creating products people actually use, pushing them toward startups and leadership roles rather than large companies or pure engineering work.
orchidfiles.com
· 2026-09-07
Austin Z. Henley, a Microsoft engineer, built a minimalist Python interpreter written in C that fits within 1024 bytes of code, after an initial attempt at 512 bytes proved too small. The interpreter supports a limited subset of Python syntax—including def, colons, indentation, and parenthesis-free if statements—enough to run a FizzBuzz program, but skips CPython's full tokenizing, AST, and bytecode pipeline in favor of global variables and a fixed-length array.
austinhenley.com
· 2026-09-06
A programmer has released Bespoke, a tongue-in-cheek statically typed language that requires every command to begin with a polite greeting and end with an acknowledgement, using the .charming file extension. Dubbed 'The Queen's Code,' it treats the compiler, output console, host environment and shared objects as parties deserving formal correspondence rather than blunt instructions. The project pokes fun at the terse, imperative tone of conventional programming syntax, and its creator notes the implementation is far less developed than its etiquette rules.
blog.hofstede.it
· 2026-09-06
A developer who struggled with traditional music instruction wrote a tutorial that builds music theory from scratch using code, starting with a single oscillating number representing air pressure. The piece shows how the twelve-note system, scales, and chords can be derived computationally from physics and arithmetic rather than memorized as arbitrary convention, using simple audio programming examples like sine wave oscillators.
runjs.app
· 2026-09-02
Marty Lamb argues that as coding agents drive the cost of writing software toward zero, the deeper skill of understanding that code is quietly becoming optional. He warns that offloading writing, review, and testing to AI lets developers skip building the mental models that manual coding used to force on them by default.
martiansoftware.com
· 2026-08-31
Cloudflare redesigned how DNS cache entries are stored in memory for its 1.1.1.1 resolver platform, Big Pineapple, cutting each entry's size from 953 bytes to 420 bytes. The changes, detailed by systems engineer Sebastiaan Neuteboom, involved five Rust-level optimizations including fixed-size data structures, merged record lists, and raw wire-format storage instead of padded fields.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-08-28
A software engineer describes a personal experiment begun in February where they stopped writing code manually and instead relied entirely on AI coding agents like Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code to implement changes. The account traces how tooling evolved from simple autocomplete suggestions to agents capable of editing multiple files from a single natural-language description, sharply reducing the amount of typing required.
blog.exe.dev
· 2026-08-27
Jotform's CEO, a 20-year software veteran, describes how AI tools that generate functional code from plain-language prompts are letting non-programmers build working prototypes quickly. He argues this approach is especially powerful for creating minimum viable products and automating repetitive coding tasks, though it still requires oversight from someone who understands the underlying logic.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-08-26
Canonical is funding a three-year PhD project at the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group aimed at automatically converting large C codebases into Rust. UK Research and Innovation is providing matching funds, and the project will be led by student Alex Wood under Professor Meng Wang, with Dr. Cristina David and Canonical's Jon Seager as co-supervisors.
developers.slashdot.org
· 2026-08-23
GoKawiil