This is the name of a concept to combine source code and highly structured human-readable documentation, such that the main artefact is the documentation, and the secondary artefact the full source code extracted from it. Any change to the source means changing the explanatory documentation of the goals and reasoning at the same time. It was invented by no other than Don Knuth, and he, together with his collaborators, wrote the TeX program in it, to show how it is useful in practice.

I myself have used the technique in various occasions at work, for example when taking on an important but almost unreadable piece of code I inherited at work, to preparing sources for a complex algorithm for handover when I was leaving another larger project, and also in leisure coding.

The tool which is most widely used for this approach today is Emacs org-mode. It has the advantage that it works for every programming language, and you will likely find full examples for all languages you use, but many other tools (for example for vim) exist.

Andrew Zig Roadmap 2026.

It's a 2h talk with code / demo. A lot about the new Io interface.

Assembly language programmers:

Do you see any use at all for an instruction STORE register Y in the memory location pointed to by register Y ?

I am writing my own 8-bit computer emulator for a machine with an ISA I designed myself, and the quest for orthogonality has led to this.

I noticed that the developer of kitty terminal uses this style of comments I have rarely if ever seen elsewhere:

outside
#: section {{{
inside
#: }}}

Kate text editor recognize sections for purposes of highlighting, folding etc. It's really nice for me because I sometimes I have a difficult time navigating large text files. And it lets you nest them.

• what is this called?
• are there other ways to do it?
• is it standard among text editors? I believe Kovid the dev for kitty is a vim guy so presumably there is support there also.
• why don't more people use it? are there problems?

Screenshot that shows the code folding.

• Cursor is at the end of line 7 so the whole section line 7-22 is highlighted
• lines 12-16 are folded in a 3rd level comment
• I also included tab indents just to make it easier to see what's going on (Kate treats it the same way regardless of indents)
• Highlighting/Mode > Scripts > Bash

I also like his style of distinguishing between narrative comments (starting with #:) and commented-out code (starting with #). Although in my example, Kate doesn't treat them differently. Is there a term for this? Any conventions, support etc?

#: Comment level 1 {{{
	#: Comment level 2 {{{
		#: configure something
		key value
	#: }}}
	#: Another Comment level 2 {{{
		#: Comment level 3 {{{
			#: Helpful explanatory comment
			file location
		#: }}}
		#: Comment level 3 with hidden text {{{
			you_cant see_this
			hidden_emoji "👁️"
			hidden_emoji2 " 👁️"
			hidden_emoji3 "   👁️"
		#: }}}
		#: let's set some things up
		# setting yes
		# other_setting no
		different_setting maybe
	#: }}}
	# regular comment
#: }}}

# regular comment outside anything

For a real world example, see sample kitty.conf file provided on project website.

Thoughts? It does feel like there's a lot of things you can do in comments that would be impossible or impractical to do in names alone, even outside of using comments as documentation. There's certainly much more information that you can comfortably fit into a comment compared to a name.

One of the comments in the Lobste.rs post that I got this from stuck out to me in particular:

Funny story: the other day I found an old zip among my backups that contained the source code of game that I wrote 23 years ago. I was just learning to code at the time. For some reason that I forgot, I decided to comment almost every single line of that game. There are comments everywhere, even for the most obvious things. Later on, I learned that an excess of comments is actually not considered a good practice. I learned that comments might be a code smell indicating that the code is not very clear. Good code should be so clear, that it doesn’t need comments. So I started to do my best to write clear code and I mostly stopped writing comments. Doing so only for the very few parts that were cryptic or hacky or had a very weird reason for being there.

But then I found this old code full of comments. And I thought it was wonderful. It was so easy to read, so easy to understand. Then I contrasted this with my current hobby project, which I write on an off. I had abandoned it for quite some months and I was struggling to understand my own code. I’ve done my best to write clear code, but I wish I had written more comments.

And this is even worse at work, where I have to spend a ton of time reading code that others wrote. I’m sure the authors did their best to write clear code, but I often find myself scratching my head. I cherish the moment when I find some piece of code with comments explaining things. Why they did certain things, how their high level algorithm works, what does this variable do, why I’m not supposed to make that change that looks like it will simplify things but it will break a corner case.

So, I’m starting to think that this idea that comments are not such a good practice is actually quite bad. I don’t think I can remember ever reading some code and thinking “argh so many comments! so noisy” But, on the other hand, I do find myself often in the situation where I don’t understand things and I wish there were some more comments. Now I’m trying to write comments more liberally, and I think you should do the same.

I guess that’s a generalization of the op’s idea.

I noticed a repository's .gitattributes entry for *.csv used text eol=crlf so I investigated and found this.

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/21901670

I trained a TruncatedSVC model on almost all Github stars to create embeddings for all repositories with more than 150 stars. I figured that could be useful so I fed the data to a Qdrant vector store and built an extension on top of it.

It can be downloaded on Firefox or Chrome. Hope you like it!

My computer is slow at compiling, esp. LLVM. If I were to buy a new computer, what components would I focus on to improve this?

~Update~

You can now encrypt plain text, so anything you want. With this, you can send sensitive information over insecure channels or share publicly with real plausible deniability. (below 2000 characters works without issue)

~Changes~

I rebuilt the system with a different encryption design, and address many of the flaws pointed out in V1.

I really wanted any password to always decrypt so you never know if you are right. I found the XOR algorithm that does this, but there is an entropy problem, where an incorrect password will almost always output non-common characters, I attempted to solve this at its core by diving into the math and some research papers but got nowhere, as it seemed to be almost impossible.

I tried finding an algorithm that would give me perfect plausible deniability, so if you shared a link X with a password you could use a different password and get Y, saying you never intended to share X. It doesn't exist 😢 I came up with a workaround by adding decoys which are mutable XOR ciphers joined, it allows you to set what other data is included, so you can tailor your alibi.

Here is the demo link. There are three memes you can find

Password: test1, test2, test3

~Safety~

It should be safe to share data encrypted with this method, I did some basic brute force tests and did not find any shortcuts, I have a rough estimate of a billion years on a server farm for a 12digit password.

~Considerations~

@calcopiritus@lemmy.world said:

"There’s 2 secrets here: the link and the password. And to share it with someone you need to share 2 secrets: the locked link and the password."

A strong password is almost impossible to crack, but you can use a popular text link tool like pastebin with expiry to mask the encrypted data. As for eliminating the password, I have considered using the site as the 'shared secret' so you share just the cipher, and if you know the URL you can paste it in, and it would be encrypted/decrypted with a derived key the site stored.

Are there communities, free software/open source or otherwise, using Lemmy as their forum software?

Nowadays, many use Discourse, some are on Zulip, and I just don't care about the Discord ones. Would Lenmy not fit the same purposes? It is federated and easier to participate in, like mailing lists - no need to sign up per forum. Matrix is too, but it doesn't seem to be made for long-form writing.

I believe Discourse was designed based on experience with community dynamics, and Zulip is well-designed too. Would something with federated participation like Lemmy not work as well?

I recently took up running and need a few good podcasts to listen to while doing so. I thought this would be a great opportunity to broaden my general programming knowledge and keep more in touch with new developments - can you recommend something?

Everything goes, from weekly stuff summarizing new tech to deep dives into certain topics.

After 20 years, PNG is back with renewed vigor! A new PNG spec was just released.

I made this tool so you can share 'locked' links safely & anonymously with a password. It gives you plausible deniability and crowd blending when sharing privates links.🔒

https://qrc.site/anon (open sauce) 🦑

Cross-posted from "How could I allow users to schedule sending emails at a specific interval?" by @lena@gregtech.eu in !learn_programming@programming.dev

Basically, I'm trying to figure out how I could allow a user to send a schedule in the cron syntax to some API, store it into the database and then send an email to them at that interval. The code is at gragorther/epigo. I'd use go-mail to send the mails.

I found stuff like River or Asynq to schedule tasks, but that is quite complex and I have absolutely no idea what the best way to implement it would be, so help with that is appreciated <3