Addendum to "This Post Is Not About Python"

Programming languages seem to have somewhat stagnated to me. A lot of shuffling around ideas that already exist, not a lot of new ones. This is not necessarily bad. Shuffling around ideas that already exist is a natural part of refining them. Shuffling around ideas that already exist is safer than a radical rewrite of existing convention. Even...

To set expectations, this is not a sweeping review of the entire industry; indeed, quite the contrary. This is just one guy’s story about his limited experiences with VR gaming. About five years ago, the office I work at allowed some interested employees to host a “VR Gaming” event in the main conference room. It wasn’t sponsored by the company,...

An increasingly-frequently asked question in the Go subreddit is some variant of: “I have this code but it isn’t doing what I expect it to do.” type MyStruct struct { // definition } type OtherStruct struct { // definition } type MySumType interface { MyStruct | OtherStruct } func main() { myStruct := MyStruct{...} printVal(myStruct) } func...

Pure Python is generally a slow language. Written for performance, it will often be around 40-50 times slower than C, and Python “written for performance” is Python that is very straightforward and does not use many of its features. Python code that has a couple of methods on inherited classes, maybe a non-trivial decorator, and some __getattr__...

The term “magic” is commonly thrown about in the programming world without a definition. This post gives a definition for it. Not the definition, just a definition. As a long-standing fuzzy term, I can’t necessarily capture all uses of it in the wild, but I believe this captures a lot of the practical value. Magic Definition A piece of code is...