My opinion is that talking about languages is usually a very unproductive use of time. If these discussions are just cat fights, then it is even worse. Unless you are a language designer, you are writing a language or study a language, you should just use a language and nobody should care.

But good articles on language pro and cons are always nice. They may be helpful to choose the right tool for the problem. For this reason I link a good article on Go. And that’s the last time I’ll talk about Go.

Game Development is one of the fields in which Rust can gain a lot of traction. As a modern compiled language with performances comparable to C++, Rust can finally free us from the tyranny of C++ bloated feature set, hard-to-link dependencies, and header/implementation file double-madness (I am obviously exaggerating, btw).

However, if this freedom arrive, it will be a very slow process. To make it slower, the feature of memory safety in videogames is not a huge priority compared to the ability to quickly prototype. The borrow-checker and the strict compiler are an obstacle in this regard. On the other hand, memory safety also means easier multi-threading. And this is sweet!

Fortunately, the annoyances of borrow-checker will get less in the way while people becomes more confident with the language, and while tooling gets better and better. I am confident we may see Rust carve out its space in this domain.

But this is the future. What about now?

A lot of startups are using “blockchain” as a replacement hyped word for “distributed database”. Well, a blockchain is the most inefficient and slow “distributed database” ever created. Blockchain strength is not in being a database! Stop doing that!

The blockchain power is in avoiding divergent transactions, and guarantee a not falsifiable and immutable history. That is, no node in the system can alter the past of the chain. That’s it. They are huge and specific problems.

One of the feature I like the most on Rust is automatic documentation. Documentation is a pillar in language ergonomic, and I love that Rust spend so much time into making documentation and documenting code a much pleasant experience.

Rust autogenerated documentation (with cargo doc) looks good, every crate on crates.io get its documentation published on docs.rs, and, most important, every code example in the code is compiled and run as a “unit test” making sure that all the examples are up-to date!

This is the time of the year in which I propose 5 emerging/new languages that you should keep an eye on the next year. I’ve done it last year, and the year before, and the year before that.

This year, however, I am not in the mood of doing it. There are several reasons why. The first one is that this year there have not been a lot of movement on the new programming languages. I am sure there are a lot, but no one got enough attention to make into a list. Therefore, I am concerned that I will just starting to repeat myself talking about the same stuff.

Some time ago I found on my grandma’s house an old Italian book on cryptography from 1897. Why a 120 years old book on cryptography was on my grandma house, is a mystery. I’d like to think that some grand-grand-parent was a late 19th century hacker. Anyway.

The book title is “Crittografia ossia l’arte di cifrare e decifrare le corrispondenze segrete” of Count Luigi Gioppi of Turkheim.

Well, I don’t know if this book is hard to find. In any way, I decided to take a photo of every page to share and preserve this book. The book is very old and some page is ruined, sorry if the quality of the photo is not optimal. I’ve done my best for not destroying the book in the process. :) I will release the photo one chapter at the time. Keep this page in the bookmark.

My last week project involves PureScript and Halogen and the Dwarf Fortress calendar. I wanted to give a first-hand experience with some pure functional language for web front-end and, after discarding Elm, I ended with PureScript. I will not go on a comparison between PureScript and the rest of the world. If you want a comparison among the other candidates, you can look at this very detailed article. (There is ClojureScript too, if Clojure will ever came back from the graveyard).

Today, during my daily web crawling, I found this article by Matt Mullenweg. I will not dwell in details, you can read the full story in the linked post. But I try to give you the core of the announcement: WordPress just decided to abandon React. This is a big news, with many implications and a few lessons to learn. Let’s go by steps.

The Context

You are probably asking yourselves: why? A perfect summary is explained u/A-Grey-World comment on Reddit:

Yesterday I wrote a cellular automaton based procedural caves generator algorithm that fits in a business card. The algorithm itself is not new. I already did it in C++, Rust, Javascript and many more languages. It is my personal approach to “Hello World”: when I want to try a new language, write a PCG algorithm in it.

You know, I quite enjoy TypeScript. It is not my favorite language ever, I am more a functional type of guy, but it is the best way to bring order into the JavaScript mess without too many hassles. Moreover, it is the language in which I prototyped my Astronomical Calendar Generator. Now that I’m working on extending it, I want to keep using TypeScript and stop falling in my usual decision paralysis. Anyway… First thing I needed to do is how to unit test a TypeScript source base. It is easy, but not intuitive. So let’s see how to do it.