Fixed in 1976 by ML, followed up by Eiffel in 2005, but unfortunately yet to be made common.

Null and undefined are fine imho with a sort of empty/missing semantics (especially since you mostly just care to == them) I have bigger issues to how similar yet different it is to have an undefined key and a not-defined key, I would almost prefer if

    obj['key']=undefined

 was the same as 

    delete obj['key']

Good to have a name for this!

My favourite debugging technique is "introduce a known error".

This validates that your set of "facts" about the file you think you're editing are actually facts about the actual file you are editing.

For example: is the damn thing even compiling?

I rely on this one a lot. Can save a ton of time that would otherwise be wasted.

Any chance you'd Open Source it?

Yes, I'm planning to write an article showing the code, mostly so I don't forget how I did it but hopefully it'll also be useful to others.

I relied on a lot of articles and code examples when putting it together so I'm happy to do the same.

Looking forward to this. We're running a Django codebase and would like to pull in Confluence articles and run GPT queries against them.

You did say philosophy of engineering, right?

Look no further than “The Specialist” by Charles Sale

“YOU'VE heard a lot of pratin' and prattlin' about this bein' the age of specialization. I'm a carpenter by trade. At one time I could of built a house, barn, church, or chicken coop. But I seen the need of a specialist in my line, so I studied her. I got her, she's mine. Gentlemen, you are face to face with the champion privybuilder of Sangamon County.”

Sometimes the best books are also the shortest.

https://www.toiletrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Spec...

Thank you so much for that. It is wonderful. So therefore you must be. I am from Ireland and the whole sense of it resonates with me; the soft humour, the self-confidence, the sheer loveliness of his outlook, the different times. And the beautiful "nartural" language used is a joy. Cheers.

I found an small old copy of The Specialist without any attribution in a junk shop a few years ago and went down a short research rabbit hole about Chic Sale. Thanks for the reminder!

That was a great read! Thank you for posting this gem.

To me this looks like a Jevons Paradox situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox [1]

Increased developer productivity will lead to a lot more software development, at all levels, rather than less.

1. "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced."

Yes, demand grows as prices drop. I don't doubt this general principle for a second. But the question is about degrees. If the cost of making software at today's level of quality and quantity drops by half, what share of the savings is going to be spent on more and better software, what share is going to be spent on other things and what share will be used to cut prices?

I think there is no general answer to this question. What would Netflix do if software development costs dropped by half? Develop twice as much software? Spend it on more content? Cut the price of subscriptions? In this specific case, my bet would be on content.

To me software _is_ content because it's tied to attention and consumption. There will always be humans producing it and consuming it, it isn't a limited resource that goes away once a tool comes along to make it easier to produce. If the costs halve, then more is produced.

Let's not forget that reduced cotton prices (because of a technological improvement) did make cotton more affordable, lots of new clothes at reduced prices, increased demand, but it didn't turn out that great for the slaves.

The relevant aspect of what you're referencing is that it led to more slaves.

For more than a decade, software developers have easily been able to get low 6 figure jobs right out of college. We're pretty far from slaves.

Well each of our microservices is also a Node package, so we also do that ourselves for the Lambda deployments - load 'em all up in the one Lamdba!

fs.watch is definitely a high priority in order to support day-to-day dev as a build system.

(Hey Jarred - Let’s get that zig package thing done soon!)

This is pretty fun - used it to generate diagrams for my book!

Yep! I used it for all of the diagrams in my chapter (Ch. 31) in Ray Tracing Gems 2.

My diagrams were showing lens optics and it was really nice to be able to parameterize the main inputs (e.g., focal length, sensor distance, object placement, etc.) and then let Asymptote derive everything from there.

I could tweak the parameters and have it instantly recalculate the diagram until I found something that looked good. All while keeping everything placed consistently.

The other thing I did was to start by creating a single master diagram that was super messy and cluttered but contained everything that I might want. Then I copied that and selectively commented out parts, leaving just the elements that I wanted to highlight.

I think I'd have gone crazy if I was trying to calculate and draw everything to scale manually in Illustrator or something like that, while making tweaks across all the figures to keep them consistent.

And all was driven from a Makefile, of course.

Not really safe to assume there's a decent one. Better to install directly from https://nodejs.org/

I will hire the founders of a failed startup any day of the week over just about any other category of candidate. They are "salted" horses of the finest calibre.

In my last shop, we had 8 (I think) former CEOs on staff. All made very significant impacts to the business.

If you are staring into the Valley of Death, remember that it is a valley, and you do come out the other side, and that makes you rare and valuable.