Tux Machines

Programming Leftovers

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 06, 2023

Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and More

Security and Proprietary Software

Using TLA⁺ at Work

↺ Using TLA⁺ at Work

> Here’s a short report of a time I used TLA⁺ at work, with interesting results. TLA⁺ is a formal specification language that is particularly effective when applied to concurrent & distributed systems. TLA⁺ made it tractable for an ordinary software engineer to reason about a tricky distributed systems problem, and it found a bug introduced by an “optimization” I tried to add (classic). The bug required 12 sequential steps to occur and would not have been uncovered by ordinary testing.

BASIC vs. FORTRAN 77: Comparing programming blasts from the past

↺ BASIC vs. FORTRAN 77: Comparing programming blasts from the past

> If you grew up with computers in the 1970s and 1980s, as I did, you probably learned a common programming language for personal computers called BASIC, or the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. You could find BASIC implementations on every personal computer of the era, including the TRS-80, Apple II, and the IBM PC. Back then, I was a self-taught BASIC programmer, experimenting with AppleSoft BASIC on the Apple II before moving to GW-BASIC on the IBM PC and, later, to QuickBASIC on DOS.

> But once upon a time, a popular language for scientific programming was FORTRAN, short for FORmula TRANslation. Although since the 1990 specification of the language, the name is more commonly stylized as "Fortran."

> When I studied physics as a university undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I leveraged my experience in BASIC to learn FORTRAN 77. That was when I realized that BASIC derived many of its concepts from FORTRAN. To be clear, FORTRAN and BASIC differ in lots of other ways, but I found that knowing a little BASIC helped me to learn FORTRAN programming quickly.

> I want to show some similarities between the two languages by writing the same program in both. I'll explore the FOR loop in BASIC and FORTRAN 77 by writing a sample program to add a list of numbers from 1 to 10.

Our favorite fonts for the Linux terminal

↺ Our favorite fonts for the Linux terminal

> Terminal emulators came up as a topic for me recently, and it got me thinking: What's everyone's favorite terminal font?

> So I asked Opensource.com contributors to share what font they like to use. Here are their answers.

Exposing Field Errors

↺ Exposing Field Errors

> This post is about exposing field errors programmatically. I have already shared some opinions (such as a caution about displaying messages below fields or avoiding default browser field validation), but this post dives into using ARIA to convey them to screen reader users.

> With fields that produce error messages on blur, I compare two types of live regions along with aria-describedby and aria-errormessage. This post does not address whether or not it is ideal to validate fields on blur. You can find plenty of opinions elsewhere.

gemini.tuxmachines.org