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Coercing deep const-ness

Published: 10 September 2021
Tags: cpp

Const-ness is considered useful because you can mentally check off a variable as being immutable. In this article, Barry Revzin first shows us how C++ "function template that both enforces and coerces that it does not mutate its argument" that only works with pointers and references. Barry then goes on to implement a function template of a similar nature that works with spans.

Hack Pipe for Functional Programmers: How I learned to stop worrying and love the placeholder

Published: 11 September 2021
Tags: javascript

Functional programming in Javascript is no new thing, but usually requires third-party packages to take full advantage of it. More and more though, features from these packages are leaking into the core language. In this exploratory article, James DiGioia explains how and why he changed his mind in regards to the implementation of a pipe operator, from the F# style, to Hack style.

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

Published: 1 October 2011
Tags: philosophy

Full disclosure, this article is a decade old. However, I found its concepts were timeless, so figured no harm in featuring it. Bret Victor's exceptionally interactive article "presents the ladder of abstraction, a technique for thinking explicitly about [different levels of abstraction], so a designer can move among them consciously and confidently".