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.
After seeing positive references to it on Linux Weekly News and elsewhere, I bought a copy of “Mastering Emacs” by Mickey Petersen.
On 08 April 2024, I drove up to Erie, PA, to see the total eclipse of the sun.
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?
I originally prepared this video as a guide for a relative of mine, but then was surprised how well it came out.
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:
I was recently reminded of the minimal set of project management artifacts and activities that are, in one way or another, simply indispensable.
None of this is news: all of this has been well established for at least 25 years (a quarter-century!), so I was surprised that apparently it is still not common knowledge or practice — at least not as common as one would wish for.
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.