Plus an update on Rails 6, Intel's growing adoption of Rust, and the challenge of making breaking changes.

Links:

• Feedback: Academia and Industry — Do either of you have any insights as to how the software development community would view someone with a math PhD, but no industry coding experience as a job applicant? Any advice would be appreciated.
• Feedback: Absurd Abstractions — FYI about wanting interface in Python: they are called abstract base classes. Check out the standard library module, abc for that and collections.abc some useful predefined container interfaces.
• Feedback: Breaking Changes — I developed  a niche Python package that has some user following in the network security realm.  I’m at a crossroads though as a change I want to make will subtly break scripts that worked in previous/current versions.  The end result of my pending change  is good for the project but I fear I’ll ruin the workflow of my users.  Other than my github page I don’t know how to query/inform my users of this pending change.  What should I do?
• Ruby on Rails 6.0 Release Notes — Make Webpacker the default JavaScript compiler for Rails 6
• Intel and Rust: the Future of Systems Programming: Josh Triplett — Hear about how Intel is working to bring Rust to full parity with C, building the future of systems programming.
• Altruism Still Fuels the Web. Businesses Love to Exploit It | WIRED — The original well-meaning, geeky architects of the web believed that there was an abundance of altruism in human nature—and they were more correct on this count, it turns out, than many esteemed social philosophers were. But they were too optimistic in overlooking the possibility that corporations would exploit and colonize this new realm. If only we had all seen it coming.
• The Crystal Programming Language — Crystal is statically type checked, so any type errors will be caught early by the compiler rather than fail on runtime. Moreover, and to keep the language clean, Crystal has built-in type inference, so most type annotations are unneeded.
• The Imposter's Handbook by Rob Conery — You've had to learn on the job. New languages, new frameworks, new ways of doing things - a constant struggle just to stay current in the industry. This left no time to learn the foundational concepts and skills that come with a degree in Computer Science.

Plus your feedback, combining ruby and rust, and the latest scandal with JEDI.

Links:

• Emacs Feedback from DJ — Another point for the show is a soft intro to functional programming. Wes mentioned Emacs because of the packages supporting Clojure development when he started with that. Elisp seems to be fairly intuitive and well documented, as a little functional language its own right (correct me if I'm wrong)--this makes for a soft intro to FP. Most of my coding has been in the space of embedded systems and low-level languages--not much functional programming to be had. This show has gotten me curious about FP, which is quite old in concept, and getting implemented nicely in modern languages. For me, I still rely heavily on special Vim keys that are not mapped in evil-mode, which causes some paper cuts. However, elisp makes it easy to customize the desired UI functionality with very short programs/elisp statements in a config file. It's quite a refreshing exercise for someone like me.
• artichoke/artichoke: Artichoke is a Ruby made with Rust — Artichoke is a platform for building MRI-compatible Ruby implementations. Artichoke provides a Ruby runtime implemented in Rust that can be loaded into many VM backends.
• AP Sources: Boeing changing Max software to use 2 computers — Boeing is working on new software for the 737 Max that will use a second flight control computer to make the system more reliable, solving a problem that surfaced in June with the grounded jet, two people briefed on the matter said Friday.
• In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places - The New York Times — Experts thought the contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, known by the cinematic acronym JEDI, would go to Amazon Web Services, the dominant player in the field of cloud computing. They did not count on two developments: an extraordinarily aggressive public relations and lobbying campaign by Oracle, one of Amazon’s competitors, and the hostility of Mr. Trump to Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos.
• The Early History of F# (pdf)
• Use F# on Linux | The F# Software Foundation
• Ionide - Crossplatform F# Editor Tools — A Visual Studio Code package suite for cross platform F# development.
• The Problem With F# Evangelism — There seems to be a constant struggle to convince seasoned C# developers to give F# a try. Which is a pity because language and concepts deserve better.
• TopShell — Purely functional, reactive scripting language.

Links:

• Porting Redis to WebAssembly with Clang/WASI — In this post, we share our experience of porting an existing open-source software package — the data structure server Redis — to WebAssembly. While this is not the first time that Redis has been ported to Wasm (see this port by Sergey Rublev), it is the first time to our knowledge that the obtained port can be run deterministically.
• Solving Problems the Clojure Way - Rafal Dittwald — It is said that Clojure is a "functional" programming language; there's also talk of "data-driven" programming. What are these things? Are they any good? Why are they good? In this talk, Rafal attempts to distill the particular blend of functional and data-driven programming that makes up "idiomatic Clojure", clarify what it looks like in practise (with real-world examples), and reflect on how Clojure's conventions came to be and how they continue to evolve.
• The Value of Values with Rich Hickey — In this keynote speech from JaxConf 2012, Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and founder of Datomic gives an awesome analysis of the changing way we think about values.
• Clojure Made Simple by Rich Hickey — In the seven years following its initial release, Clojure has become a popular alternative language on the JVM, seeing production use at financial firms, major retailers, analytics companies, and startups large and small. It has done so while remaining decidedly alternative—eschewing object orientation for functional programming, C-derived syntax for code-as-data, static typing for dynamic typing, REPL-driven development, and so on. Underpinning these differences is a commitment to the principle that we should be building our systems out of fundamentally simpler materials. This session looks at what makes Clojure different and why.
• Effective Programs: 10 Years of Clojure by Rich Hickey
• sparklemotion/mechanize — Mechanize is a ruby library that makes automated web interaction easy.
• How to write idempotent Bash scripts — It happens a lot, you write a bash script and half way it exits due an error. You fix the error in your system and run the script again. But half of the steps in your scripts fail immediately because they were already applied to your system. To build resilient systems you need to write software that is idempotent.

Plus gradual typing for Ruby, a new solution for Python packaging, and the real story behind Jony Ive's exit.

Links:

• Goroutines - Concurrency in Golang — Goroutines are functions or methods that run concurrently with other functions or methods. Goroutines can be thought of as light weight threads. The cost of creating a Goroutine is tiny when compared to a thread.
• Why build concurrency on the ideas of CSP? — One of the most successful models for providing high-level linguistic support for concurrency comes from Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes, or CSP. Occam and Erlang are two well known languages that stem from CSP. Go's concurrency primitives derive from a different part of the family tree whose main contribution is the powerful notion of channels as first class objects.
• Jony Ive ‘dispirited’ by Tim Cook’s lack of interest in product design — To many, Jony Ive’s announced departure from Apple last week felt very sudden. But a narrative is forming to suggest that he’s been slowly exiting for years as the company shifted priorities from product design to operations.
• CSP Paper
• A Tour of Go — These example programs demonstrate different aspects of Go. The programs in the tour are meant to be starting points for your own experimentation.
• GoLand: A Clever IDE to Go by JetBrains — GoLand is cross-platform IDE built specially for Go developers.
• Google I/O 2013 - Advanced Go Concurrency Patterns — Concurrency is the key to designing high performance network services. This talk expands on last year's popular Go Concurrency Patterns talk to dive deeper into Go's concurrency primitives, and see how tricky concurrency problems can be solved gracefully with simple Go code.
• Michael Dominick on Twitter — Ok, so this is cool I have a fully working #rails dev environment up under #Windows usign #WSL and @PengwinLinux. Using @code for the editor. So far so good!
• Pengwin by Whitewater Foundry — Pengwin is a Linux environment for Windows 10 built on work by Microsoft Research and the Debian project.
• Open-sourcing Sorbet — Sorbet is a fast, powerful type checker designed for Ruby. It scales to codebases with millions of lines of code and can be adopted incrementally.
• Sorbetting a gem, or the story of the first adoption — After reading about Brandon's first impression (highly recommend to check it out), I decided to give Sorbet a try and integrate it into one of my gems.
• Gradual typing of Ruby at Scale — This talk shares experience of Stripe successfully been building a typechecker for internal use, including core design decisions made in early days of the project and how they withstood reality of production use
• Building Standalone Python Applications with PyOxidizer — PyOxidizer's marquee feature is that it can produce a single file executable containing a fully-featured Python interpreter, its extensions, standard library, and your application's modules and resources. In other words, you can have a single .exe providing your application.
• Packaging Your Code — The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
• An Overview of Packaging for Python
• pex — pex is a library for generating .pex (Python EXecutable) files which are executable Python environments in the spirit of virtualenvs.
• shiv — shiv is a command line utility for building fully self-contained Python zipapps as outlined in PEP 441, but with all their dependencies included!

Plus Wes asks 'Why Not Kotlin' and breaks down where it fits in his toolbox.

Links:

• Kotlin overview — Kotlin is an open-source, statically-typed programming language that supports both object-oriented and functional programming. Kotlin provides similar syntax and concepts from other languages, including C#, Java, and Scala, among many others. Kotlin does not aim to be unique—instead, it draws inspiration from decades of language development. It exists in variants that target the JVM (Kotlin/JVM), JavaScript (Kotlin/JS), and native code (Kotlin/Native).
• Kotlin/Native — Kotlin/Native is a technology for compiling Kotlin code to native binaries, which can run without a virtual machine. It is an LLVM based backend for the Kotlin compiler and native implementation of the Kotlin standard library.
• Kotlin for JavaScript — Kotlin provides the ability to target JavaScript. It does so by transpiling Kotlin to JavaScript. The current implementation targets ECMAScript 5.1 but there are plans to eventually target ECMAScript 2015 as well.
• My favorite examples of functional programming in Kotlin — One of the great things about Kotlin is that it supports functional programming. Let’s see and discuss some simple but expressive functions written in Kotlin.
• Arrow: Functional companion to Kotlin's Standard Library — Arrow aims to provide a lingua franca of interfaces and abstractions across Kotlin libraries. For this, it includes the most popular data types, type classes and abstractions such as Option, Try, Either, IO, Functor, Applicative, Monad to empower users to write pure FP apps and libraries built atop higher order abstractions.
• Awesome Kotlin Resources — The ultimate resource list for your most loved coding language.
• awesome-kotlin — A curated list of awesome Kotlin frameworks, libraries, documents and other resources
• Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Warns Always-On Work Culture Creating ‘Broken’ People - WSJ — “I’ve spoken out quite a bit about things like ‘hustle porn,’ and this ceremony of showing off on social [media] about how hard you’re working,” said Mr. Ohanian, who previously co-founded online discussion forum Reddit. “Y’all see it on Instagram and you certainly see it in the startup community, and it becomes really toxic.”
• Thread by @mwseibel — I’ve noticed that many people compete in games they don’t understand because they are modeling the behavior of people around them. Most common is the competition for wealth as a proxy for happiness.
• Understanding Burnout Meetup — You may not know it yet, but IT is not easy. Breakdowns in people, processes, and technology leads to frustrating times for all of us. As it spirals out of control, we often meet the final boss: burnout.
• Linux Academy is Hiring!

Plus the state of linux application packaging, and Chris' ultimate mobile workflow.

Links:

• Brydge Keyboard for iPad Pro
• Reason Homepage — Reason lets you write simple, fast and quality type safe code while leveraging both the JavaScript & OCaml ecosystems.
• What & Why · Reason — Reason can almost be considered as a solidly statically typed, faster and simpler cousin of JavaScript, minus the historical crufts, plus the features of ES2030 you can use today, and with access to both the JS and the OCaml ecosystem!
• BuckleScript · Write safer and simpler code in OCaml & Reason, compile to JavaScript. — BuckleScript is backed by OCaml. Decades of type system research and compiler engineering.
• Null, Undefined & Option · Reason — Reason itself doesn't have the notion of null or undefined. This is a great thing, as it wipes out an entire category of bugs. No more undefined is not a function, and cannot access foo of undefined!
• Variant! · Reason — Behold, the crown jewel of Reason data structures! Most data structures in most languages are about "this and that". A variant allows us to express "this or that".
• Ken Wheeler - ReasonML is Serious Business
• Syntax Cheatsheet · Reason — We've worked very hard to make Reason look like JS while preserving OCaml's great semantics & types. Hope you enjoy it!
• OCaml Homepage — OCaml is an industrial strength programming language supporting functional, imperative and object-oriented styles.
• ReasonReact · All your ReactJS knowledge, codified. — It's Just Reason. We leverage the existing type system to create a library that types just right. Plus lightweight, first-class support for the ReactJS community idioms you've been using.
• ReasonML - React as first intended — ReasonML is the new tech that Facebook is using to develop React applications and promoting as a futuristic version of JavaScript
• Create your first snap | Ubuntu tutorials — The snapcraft tool is the preferred way to build snaps. It reads a simple, declarative file and runs the build for us.
• Creating a snap - Snap documentation — A snap can be created from apps you’ve already built and zipped, or from your preferred programming language or framework.
• Snapcraft Summit, Montreal 2019 - Day 1, 2 & 3
• Similar projects · AppImage/AppImageKit Wiki — This page compares various similar systems to AppImage. Of course, each system was built toward its own specific objectives. This page is intended to illustrate the points that were important in the AppImage design, and similarities as well as differences to other systems.
• Flathub—An app store and build service for Linux — Welcome to Flathub, the home of hundreds of apps which can be easily installed on any Linux distribution. Browse the apps online, from your app center or the command line.
• Mantiz Venus MZ-02 External Graphic Enclosure — Connects Full High Full Length 120" Width 2.5 PCIE Desktop Power GPU to computer WITH an Intel Certified Thunderbolt 3 port.
• The Mad Botter INC on Twitter — Congratulations @ChinKyler on winning our #FOSS #Earthday competition and with it a @system76 #GalagoPro. Keep hacking and keep it #Linux!
• Linux Academy is hiring! — Linux academy is looking for full stack Node.JS+Angular and Ruby on Rails developers. Come join the team!

Plus Mike's battles with fan noise, and why he's doubling down on the eGPU lifestyle.

Links:

• Thelio Fan Noise Hack - Mike's Blog — I’ve had a System 76 Thelio for a little over four months now and a consistent issue that I’ve been experiencing is persistent fan noise even when the machine is idle.
• Advent of Code 2015
• Elixir — Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.
• Mike on Twitter — Someone tell @wespayne that I hate him ;) He introduced me to @elixirlang and it's like fast #Ruby. I think I might be hooked. Totally failed to get anything done though lol
• Elixir vs. Ruby and Phoenix vs. Rails: Detailed Comparison and Use Cases — If you are facing the Elixir vs. Ruby/Phoenix vs. Rails dilemma, the best way to decide is to cater to the needs of your project. In fact, it is even possible to use both technologies in one project by choosing which of them works best for each individual feature. For example, you can implement chats with Elixir Phoenix, and the rest of the code can be written in Ruby on Rails.
• TypeScript - JavaScript that scales. — TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.
• Why TypeScript · TypeScript Deep Dive — Types have proven ability to enhance code quality and understandability. However, types have a way of being unnecessarily ceremonious. TypeScript is very particular about keeping the barrier to entry as low as possible.
• Basic Types · TypeScript Handbook
• TypeScript Playground
• microsoft/TypeScript-New-Handbook — Incubation repository for the new TypeScript handbook.
• Introduction - fp-ts — fp-ts provides developers with popular patterns and reliable abstractions from typed functional languages in TypeScript.
• Purify — Functional programming library for TypeScript
• piotrwitek/utility-types — Collection of utility types, complementing TypeScript built-in mapped types and aliases (think "lodash" for static types).
• Solving Problems the Clojure Way - Rafal Dittwald — After overcoming a fear of brackets, the next challenge for would-be Clojurians is less superficial: to stop writing Java (or Javascript, or Haskell...) with Clojure's syntax, and actually start "thinking" in Clojure. It is said that Clojure is a "functional" programming language; there's also talk of "data-driven" programming. What are these things? Are they any good? Why are they good? In this talk, Rafal attempts to distill the particular blend of functional and data-driven programming that makes up "idiomatic Clojure", clarify what it looks like in practise (with real-world examples), and reflect on how Clojure's conventions came to be and how they continue to evolve.

Plus a fresh reminder of Apple's absolute App Store authority, and the state of Mike's relationship with the rust compiler.

Links:

• RustPython: A Python Interpreter written in Rust
• Apple bans Facebook’s Research app that paid users for data
• Apple restores Google’s own internal iPhone apps after privacy brouhaha — For less than a day, Apple had briefly revoked Google’s iOS certificate that enabled those private apps to conduct various internal business such as company shuttles, food menus, as well as pre-release beta testing, and more.
• Apple Developer Enterprise Program — Get tools and resources to transform your mobile workforce with enterprise-class apps, distributed seamlessly and securely within your organization.
• Apple Is Fighting a Good Fight Against Facebook and Google — The implication that Apple is exhibiting some monopolistic urge to gutshot Facebook and Google makes close to zero sense. The events of this week will not affect their bottom lines, and Apple could have taken much more drastic action to lock down iOS — as it has before.
• Nilay Patel on Twitter — Hi, I'm the nagging voice in the back of your head pointing out that it's pretty intense that Apple can simply decide to prevent people from running code on their phones.
• Essential .NET - C# 8.0 and Nullable Reference Types — Nonetheless, as it currently stands, and even after 7 versions of C#, we still don’t have a perfect language.
• Make your next C# project non-nullable — The naming is a bit confusing, because reference types have always been nullable, and that’s the whole problem. The novelty is that they can now also be non-nullable.
• Switch to errors instead of warnings for nullable reference types in C# 8 — Nullable reference types coming in C# 8 are a great addition to anyone’s toolbox. But if you tried it you probably know “just” warnings are produced. And sometimes you’d like to have errors instead of warnings, so the build fails hard or something like that. It’s surprisingly easy to do so.