Sundar @digital_carver@social.cleverlibre.org

I just completed "Handy Haversacks" - Day 7 - Advent of Code 2020 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/7 in #JuliaLang.

I wanted to do something interesting using Julia's multiple dispatch, making each outer bag a function and the inner bags the parameters, but it would have needed too much macro munchkinry and ended up in the "too clever for its own good" type code. I'm not trying to be [Mel the Real Programmer](https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html) after all.

Julia feels really good. Multiple ways of doing things, so I can choose what's appropriate for each context. Lots of useful little tools built into the language, neat syntax, and the REPL is really useful for messing around and figuring things out before writing them into a program.

I just completed "Custom Customs" - Day 6 - Advent of Code 2020 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/6 in #JuliaLang.

Every day, while implementing Part 2, I end up with a more elegant neater way of doing Part 1. Never occurs to me while doing Part 1 itself - probably because I come up with an idea while reading the question and rush to implement it, not stopping to think of other ways of doing it .

Did the [subset sum challenge](https://qoto.org/web/statuses/103097971180704809) today, in #JuliaLang. [Code here](https://git.qoto.org/digital_carver/toy-programming-challenges/-/blob/master/subsetsum.jl). I used to get stuck with dynamic programming problems, finding them hard to reason about, so it was pleasant to find that with this one the logic flowed nice and easy. Typing in the test cases and getting the test setup going took up more time than actually solving the problem itself!

Tried a #toyprogrammingchallenge today, was pretty fun. @namark thanks for recommending these! I expect I'm gonna spend a lot of hours on these in the next few weeks.

I just completed "Toboggan Trajectory" - Day 3 - Advent of Code 2020 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/3 using #JuliaLang

Lessons (re-)learnt:
* did you know that example data is also data? I'd forgotten it! Using that for testing made things easier - when I finally thought of it - since it's so much smaller and easier to eyeball.
* Julia's dynamism came back to bite in the usual way it does - since there's no variable declarations required, when I messed up a variable name change and left the old name in in some places, Julia was happy to treat those as two separate variables and end up with weird results.
* Repl.it has a decent #Vim mode, but is otherwise a pain to use; it messes with outputs and makes error messages so much harder to read.
* Good practices are good practices for a reason. Magic numbers and baked-in literals are fertile grounds for bugs, even in little one-off projects like this.
* Naming things is hard!

I just completed "Password Philosophy" - Day 2 - Advent of Code 2020 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/2 using #JuliaLang.

Day 2 was kind of a letdown. The problems felt particularly pointless, and there was no thinking or creative problem solving required; just look up some functions in your language's manual and then it's just nitty gritty work.
Let's hope Day 3 has something fresh and interesting!

I just completed "Report Repair" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2020 #AdventOfCode in Julia.

Thanks to https://repl.it/ for enabling me to do that despite my local OS being borked (and so not having a usable Julia). Pretty good online coding experience for minor projects like this.

https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/1

Found an answer in the Announcement post when Markdown was introduced to Qoto:

> Keep in mind that while many other fediverse serves will view the rich text not all servers can or will and the formatting will be converted into html in a best-effort to remain compatible. For examples vanilla Mastodon instances reject all special formatting, but links from markdown should still be correctly rendered, but bold and other formatting will be filtered out on Mastodon. Pleorma and other software which allows rich-text should properly render the markdown.

So basically, it seems like links should likely work everywhere without a problem, it's just fancy text rendering that's likely to get stripped out elsewhere.

So, communication among Fediverse instances isn't as seamless as I thought, it seems. Opening my profile on other Fedi servers, one server thinks my last toot was two weeks ago, another seems to be picking up one toot every few days and dropping the others. Neither showed the above toot in the page, so I still don't know how the Markdown thing works. (Mobile clients seem to support the mardown/richtext more commonly than I expected, which is nice.)

What happens when links done in Markdown syntax here encounter interfaces that can't handle Markdown? Are they displayed as the syntax itself (which would be fine, you can still access the URL), or does it just turn into normal text, the URL gone?
[Here's a great video about how the HIV works on the body, for a test](https://vimeo.com/260291607/5bcaf19961).

https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html
is interesting.

I once went searching for more natural-sounding singular pronouns than "xe" or "ze", but couldn't find any that had any significant following. (Singular "they" is ok in some places, but often sounds unnatural, and introduces more ambiguity in a language that's already ambiguous and difficult enough to learn for newcomers.)

Stallman's suggestion of "perse" (from person) for "he/she", "per" for "her/him", and "pers" for "hers/his" is easily to learn, sounds natural pretty quickly, and doesn't sacrifice clarity. "perse" and "pers" sounding alike in speech might be an issue, but maybe the context will clarify it in most cases, and maybe it's less of an ambiguity than arises from singular "they"? What do you think?

So just learnt that Cloudflare "email protection" is a thing (https://mstdn.io/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection).
Additionally, Cloudflare thinks Mastodon IDs are email addresses: so if you have Javascript disabled, you might find that instead of Mastodon IDs you only get to see `[email.protected]` everywhere. Thanks, Cloudflare, for going far and beyond your duties of serving pages given to you, for the sake of our "protection"!