Latest posts from codeutopia.net
This post is a critique on some Programming as Theory Building related points in Sean Goedecke’s post In defense of not understanding your codebase . I was sent a link to it by Valeri Karpov , who wanted to hear my thoughts on it. Goedecke’s post was an interesting and thought provoking read. What he writes is not wrong per-se, but I think the perspective in his post to what Peter Naur writes…
For the longest time, I’ve had a stack of old 3.5” floppy disks. At some point in the past years, I thought it would be fun to see what’s on them. But how do you do that on a modern PC? I hadn’t had an actual floppy drive for the longest time. There are two options: Get a USB floppy drive (cheap, easy) Get a floppy controller and a “proper” floppy drive I tried them both, mainly because I only…
I recently read philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s book The Concept of Mind , as it was one of the books referenced by Peter Naur’s text Programming as Theory Building (which I wrote about here previously ). I wanted to read it because I was interested in the background of Naur’s arguments, and was not disappointed, as The Concept of Mind is a quite fascinating book. It provides a lot of insight into…
Ever since I first used Svelte , there was something about it that felt very “natural”. Something about the way code in Svelte is structured just felt like it was the right way to do things when compared to other JavaScript component frameworks and libraries. It has been difficult to put my finger on what it is about Svelte that makes it feel that way, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it feels…
In this post I’ll show you a simple method to collect and display backlinks from Obsidian markdown files using Hakyll. If you want to learn more about how to use Hakyll in general to publish a website from Obsidian, see my earlier post Moving from WordPress to Obsidian plus Hakyll . In Obsidian when you open a Markdown file, you can see a list of other files linking to it. This is done…
We use all kinds of metaphors in programming. Using “code smell” to describe poor coding practices is probably one of the most evocative. But what about metaphors in other fields? Could they be used to describe programming as well? There are a lot of things like “parent” and “child”, or “building” or “factory”, which clearly originate elsewhere. But these are quite widely used already in…
I would like to present an opposing view to the idea that “Traditional programming is dead”, which is being announced by software development influencers. Or maybe it’s just social media bait? Either way, there’s a lot of push to use AI tools to write code nowadays. Even many experienced developers are saying they’re not writing code by hand anymore. I’ve been programming for something like 27…
When I finished reading Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building my first thought was “How come nobody ever told me to read this?” I ended up reading it multiple times, as I attempted to collect my thoughts on why it makes so much sense. Have you ever had a situation where you’re trying to explain something or say something, and you’re looking for a suitable word or term, but no matter how much…
In this post I’ll show you how to export a WordPress blog, import it into Obsidian, and finally turn it into a website using Hakyll. This conversion has the following features/requirements - some are easily achieved, others require custom implementation in code: A reasonable folder structure in Obsidian, with useful frontmatter fields Wikilink support Support for embedded images Support for tags…
I was just on vacation for four weeks and I spent the entire time writing code. Well okay, I did also spend some time playing games because Steam summer sale and all that (I finished Bayonetta).. but that’s beside the point :) My job is to write code. Most people stop doing what they do at work when they go on vacation. During some days I probably spent more time writing code or thinking about it…