I would call those language-specific. While they are useful in more than one language, they are also replaced by language features in many languages.

• Builder pattern can be simplified with kwargs (Python, C#) or argument objects (JS, C++).
• Factory pattern can be simplified with first-class types (Lisp, Haskell).
• Visitor pattern is similarly simplified by first-class functions (supported by most languages nowadays).
• Dependency injection of concept X is generally simplified by first-class X. I think the least widely supported is dependency injection of effects (Koka).

Design patterns are typically just workarounds for the limitations of the chosen programming language. What you might consider a pattern in C might just be a simple language feature in C++, and the patterns in C++ (as popularized by GoF) might just be language features in Lisp/Rust/whatever.

So rather than thinking about patterns, you should first choose the right language for the task. If you’re working on a parser, you might prefer Haskell. If you need formal verification, there’s C and Idris and little inbetween. If you need to hire lots of developers, something widely-known like JS might be the choice.

After you’ve chosen a language, you can identify the things that the language is bad at and apply the appropriate design patterns. Sometimes the patterns can be found in books (C++, Java) and sometimes it’s just tribal knowledge (D).

Regular expressions are great and can always be matched in linear time with respect to the input string length.

The problem is that JS standard library RegExps aren’t actually regular expressions, but rather a much broader language, which is impossible to implement efficiently. If RegExp switched to proper regular expressions, they would match much faster but supporting backreferences like /(.*)x\1/ would be impossible.

It would be much easier to read if it was actually table, i.e., if hex codes and the characters were separated into their own columns.

My workplace has the opposite problem.

The company has been in dire need of programmers for years, so they hired people (including myself) without tests. However, the work involves lots of custom iterators and the occasional handcrafted parser, which most of the company is incapable of writing. The bright side is that management has their metrics mostly right, so I’m getting lots of raises for solving fun problems.

I recommend Pyright over Mypy if you don’t mind it being owned by Microsoft. It has far fewer bugs, and if you do stumble on one, you don’t have to fix it yourself because Microsoft’s paid devs will fix it in a couple of working days (at least for the small bugs I’ve reported).

I do very little coding, but it’s because our workplace has an abundance of junior developers, not because I’m pressed for time. My work is essentially just turning emails into technical specifications that others can implement and tutoring juniors when there are problems. Few to no pointless meetings because I insist on using emails or tickets whenever possible.

Agreed. I think operator overloading is a necessary feature in any math-oriented or general-purpose language. Being able to write formulae the same way as they’re written in the source paper is a huge boon to readability.

Different applications require different tests, so no measure is going to please everyone. If you’re making embedded devices for an airplane, the buyer might ask you to provide a formal proof that the program works. In contrast, web apps tend to simply use end users as testers, since it’s cheaper.

What is the median amount of times you end up shuffling the array before it is sorted?

The answer is n! where n is length of the array.

I assume you meant mean instead of median. The median of a geometric distribution with parameter p is ceil(-1/log₂(1-p)).

The author wanted “a more powerful type of inference that can actually infer the whole type of a function by analyzing the body of the function”, which Rust doesn’t have by design.

I personally don’t like the idea, because keeping services entirely disconnected is good for privacy.

Furthermore, I think it’s funny that the author used Matrix as an example of a service benefiting from chat federation, when Matrix is about to be deportalled from Libera.Chat due to bad UX and leaking secret channels. If Matrix can’t even federate properly with IRC, there’s no way they can do it with modern services like Discord.

Another point in favour of databases is simplicity of client-server communication and data models.

Many objects in WoW (not too sure about spells, but most likely them too) work such that the client asks the server for the related DB rows when it sees an object for the first time. So instead of sending code across the wire, which would be a bad idea for many reasons, you instead send structured data that the client interprets.

Of course, you could just bake the spell code into the client at compile-time, but then dataminers will take it apart on day 0. WoW datamining mostly works such that you play the game normally and see what data the server gives you.

Although I’ve used a number of languages including Python, Javascript, and Go to build software, the bulk of my experience is working in Java.

I guess they weren’t that familiar with Python, considering its bolted-on type annotation system is extremely similar to Typescript.

In languages with static and convenient type systems, I try to instead encode units as types. With clever C++ templating, you can even get implicit conversions (e.g. second -> hour) and compound types (e.g. meter and second types also generate m/s, m/s^2 and so on).

Similar problems (and more) have been solved long ago by libraries, because the issues aren’t specific to music. More importantly, how does utf8 support count as a “horrible edge case” in 2022?