rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

"Britain’s ‘loneliest sheep’ marooned at foot of Scottish cliff for two years" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/27/britains-loneliest-sheep-marooned-at-foot-of-scottish-cliff-for-two-years

That despite writing code for over a decade, TIL that NaN is not just a numerical equivalent of null. It’s closer to a primitive form of Maybe/Optional, in the sense that arithmetic operators are designed to output NaN should any of their inputs be NaN thereby propagating the error state in a similar fashion to monadic composition.

TIL that it's not just humans that exchange homes in vacancy chains; hermit crabs queue up to exchange shells too!

Why I think #Roc could be the first purely functional programming language to go fully mainstream https://rlamacraft.uk/whyRocCouldBeTheFirstMainstreamPurelyFunctionalLanguage.html

I will say this, when you do actually get through to someone at HMRC they are very helpful. Just like all public services: run by people who genuinely do seem to care but just criminally understaffed and underfunded.

Labour refusing to commit to undoing Tory U-turns on net zero. It's a trap and Starmer has fallen right for it. What's even the point of voting for them if you just get the same policies. The Labour party just swings from Tory-lite to unelectable and back again every five years.

Labour need to wake up and realise that Proportional Representation isn't just good for the country, it's good for them too https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/16/labour-tories-neck-and-neck-mid-bedfordshire-race-poll-nadine-dorries

I've been listening to an episode of The Changelog podcast "You call it tech debt I call it malpractice"[1], which got me thinking what if every time we as developers wanted to to introduce some tech debt we had to fill out a form detailing our decision making and the required remediation work. These could then be reviewed periodically.

Every time we cut some corner, fail to sufficiently document or test a change, or otherwise leave the code base in a less than an ideal state there would be a trail of documentation. We could then begin to attach a cost to each documented case, and start to have a systematic process of performing cost-benefit analysis.

[1]: https://pca.st/episode/34cdb2de-7ff6-4601-b3cc-fd6c6f3c47ff