A few days ago, an article by Flutter developer Hammad Tariq caught my eye: "Rendering 10,000 Machine State Changes on a Timeline Without Freezing Flutter".
It was a solid piece of profiling detective work. Hammad was building a high-density timeline view in Flutter representing 10,000 machine state transitions. But every time the dataset loaded, the mobile UI stuttered and dropped dozens of frames.
Under a section aptly titled "The Original Sin", the author identified the culprit:
sorted.sort((a, b) => DateTime.…
The tech world is experiencing an identity crisis. Pundits are shouting from the digital rooftops that traditional coding is over, replaced by natural human language interfaces. They're calling it a radical new paradigm.
When Larry Wall created Perl, he didn't just build a language to sit closer to the metal; he built it to sit closer to speech. While computer science worshiped at the altar of rigid mathematical purism, Perl introduced a context-aware structure built on nou…
Twenty years is a long time in the world of software. That's how long it's been since I last updated my Perl module, File::Finder. But today, thanks to a bug report from a dedicated user, I'm excited to announce the release of version 1.0.0!
For those who don't know, File::Finder is a handy little module that gives you the power of the find command right in your Perl code. It turns out that it wasn't playing nicely with Windows, and it was high time to fix that.
It's a surreal and wonderful feeling to revisit code you wrote two decades ago and find that it's still useful …
A Futility Closet post references a Perl "poem" over two decades old. I remember chuckling at it when it first appeared. Although it was published "anonymously", I'm pretty sure I know who wrote it. :)
print "Just another Perl hacker"; # the original!