Software Engineering

I stumbled across a blog post about finding the median of a list of numbers as a job interview question.

I have contemplated trolling software engineers by re-naming “object oriented programming”, and claiming I have made a major discovery, Thing Based Programming.

Learning the State Machine Behind a Modal Text Editor: The (Neo)Vim Case Study
Pierre Ganty
SPIN 2024, 30th International Symposium on Model Checking Software, 10-11 April 2024, co-located with ETAPS 2024 in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg

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I implemented a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) client from the specification, RFC 1350.

Due to Go compiler and runtime subtleties, some Go variables storage is allocated on goroutines’ call stacks.

You can decide for yourself that an unholy alliance of the Go compiler and runtime can allocate variables on the call stack. But doing so forces you to notice the small initial size of a goroutine’s call stack: 0x1000, or 4096 bytes.

A Little Implementation Language
P. J. Plauger
ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 11, Issue 4, Pages 135-137

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The Go Blog has a post titled Allocating on the Stack. The post makes the claim that programs compiled with Go v1.26 compiler, and using the v1.26 runtime can allocate backing store of slices on the stack under some circumstances.

A long time ago, I worked at a company that has since merged with another large company. Back in the day, my employers kept a technical reference library that included back issues of a magazine, Software: Experience and Practice. A few of the earliest issues of that magazine had a “Computer Recreations” column. Volume 2, pages 397-400 had a column on self reproducing programs.

I came across an article by Brian Kernighan. The article is about a piece of C code written by Rob Pike, apparently for a book Pike and Kernighan wrote together, The Practice of Programming.