rstats

I’ve been learning at least one new programming language per month through Exercism and the #12in23 challenge. I’ve keep saying, every time you learn a new language, you learn something about all the others you know. Plus, once you know \(N\) languages, the \(N+1^{\rm th}\) is significantly easier. This post covers a calculation I came across in Haskell, and how I can now do the same in a lot of other languages - and perhaps can’t as easily in others.

Your collaborator says to you “I have some code I’d like to distribute to people who will probably work in R most of the time. I don’t write R, but I write C. Can you package this up for me?” so you have a few options: re-write the code in R, package up the C code and make it available in R, or say no. I decided to try out the second of these, and this post details how I achieved that.

With Functional Programming, we write functions which take arguments and do something with or based on those arguments. You might not think there’s much to learn about given that tiny description of “an argument to a function” but the syntax and mechanics of different languages is actually widely variable and intricate.

I’ve been learning at least one new programming language a month through Exercism which has been really fun and interesting. I frequently say that “every language you learn teaches you something about all the others you know” and with nearly a dozen under my belt so far I’m starting to worry about the combinatorics of that statement.

APL isn’t on the list of languages but I’ve seen it in codegolf solutions often enough that it seemed worth a look.

I’ve been following the drama of the RustConf Keynote Fiasco (RKNF, per @fasterthanlime) from a great distance - I’m not involved in that community beyond starting to learn the language. But the controversial topic itself Compile-Time Reflection seemed like something interesting I could learn something about.

Plotly has a nice way of making click-events available to the calling language, but it doesn’t quite work simply when using subplot(). This isn’t a post about a new feature, but I didn’t quickly find a resource for it so I’ll add my findings to make it easier for the next person.

I’ve been working my way through Exercism exercises in a variety of languages because I strongly believe every language you learn something about teaches you about all the others you know, and makes for useful comparisons between what features they offer. I was Learning Me a Haskell for Great Good (there’s a guide/book by that name) and something about Pattern Matching just seemed extremely familiar.

Don’t show me puzzles, unless you want to be responsible for me staying up too late solving them. I’m far too easily nerd-sniped. This one was certainly the most complex I’ve ever solved. Quite complicated too, but definitely the most complex (you’ll see).

I’ve had the impression lately that everyone is learning Rust and there’s plenty of great material out there to make that easier. {gifski} is perhaps the most well-known example of an R package wrapping a Rust Cargo crate. I don’t really know any system language particularly well, so I figured I’d wade into it and see what it’s like.

Updated: 2022-09-04

I took a very long time to post about the last Australian Signals Directorate (then DSD) decryption, so this time I’ll be a lot more punctual. This article was published today announcing that ASD have collaborated to release a new 50c coin containing a decryption challenge.

The new ASD 50c coin