Programming Leftovers

• Python 3.9.0a3

• Python 3.9.0a3 now available for testing

  Python 3.9 is still in development. This releasee, 3.9.0a3 is the third of six planned alpha releases. Alpha releases are intended to make it easier to test the current state of new features and bug fixes and to test the release process. During the alpha phase, features may be added up until the start of the beta phase (2020-05-18) and, if necessary, may be modified or deleted up until the release candidate phase (2020-08-10). Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.

• Weekly Python StackOverflow Report: (ccxii) stackoverflow python report

• Perl Weekly Challenge 044: One Hundred, Two Hundred

  We can populate each place “between digits” with one of three possible values: a plus sign, minus sign, or nothing. To check all the possible permutations, we’ll use an indicator function similarly to The Knapsack Problem. In this case, though, there are three possible values, so we need to loop over numbers in the ternary numeral system. The only operation we’ll need will be the increment, so we don’t need the full support for arithmetic in base 3. We can implement the increment ourselves: we start from the right of the number, change any 2 into 0 and move left. Once we find 0 or 1, we increment it and we’re done. To create the expression, we just need to intersperse the digits with the operators. See the apply subroutine below. To evaluate the expression, we won’t use eval, as we don’t want to introduce security problems into our code. As the operations are just addition and subtraction, we can transform the expression into a large sum of positive and negative numbers (the latter correspond to the numbers being subtracted). We’ll use a regexp match to split the expression.

• Confessions of a Recovering Proprietary Programmer, Part XVII

  One of the gatherings I attended last year featured a young man asking if anyone felt comfortable doing git rebase “without adult supervision”, as he put it. He seemed as surprised to see anyone answer in the affirmative as I was to see only a very few people so answer. This seems to me to be a suboptimal state of affairs, and thus this post describes how you, too, can learn to become comfortable doing git rebase “without adult supervision”. [...] Fortunately, one of my colleagues pointed me at tig, which provides a dynamic ASCII-art display of the selected commits. This is again not as good as gitk, but it is probably as good as it gets in a text-only environment. These tools do have their limits, and other techniques are required if you are actively rearranging more than a few hundred commits. If you are in that situation, you should look into the workflows used by high-level maintainers or by the -stable maintainer, who commonly wrangle many hundreds or even thousands of commits. Extreme numbers of commits will of course require significant automation, and many large-scale maintainers do in fact support their workflows with elaborate scripting. Doing advanced git work without being able to see what you are doing is about as much a recipe for success as chopping wood in the dark. So do yourself a favor and use tools that allow you to see what you are doing!

Software: MuseScore 3.4, arduino-copilot and LibreOffice 6.4 RC3

• MuseScore 3.4 Release

  Today we are pleased to announce another significant update, MuseScore 3.4. In addition to dozens of bug fixes, it introduces UX improvements when working with score elements and telemetry.

• Music Notation Software MuseScore 3.4 Released!

  Right-click on the Appimage, then go to Properties -> Permissions, check the box ‘Allow executing file as program’. Finally run the Appimage to launch MuseScore 3.4 and enjoy! MuseScore also available as Snap (runs in sandbox), which can be installed directly from Ubuntu Software, though it’s still v3.3.4 at the moment. Also the flathub repository contains MuseScore flatpak package....

• announcing arduino-copilot

  arduino-copilot, released today, makes it easy to use Haskell to program an Arduino. It's a FRP style system, and uses the Copilot DSL to generate embedded C code. [...] Copilot is quite an impressive embedding of C in Haskell. It was developed for NASA by Galois and is intended for safety-critical applications. So it's neat to be able to repurpose it into hobbyist microcontrollers. (I do hope to get more type safety added to Copilot though, currently it seems rather easy to confuse eg miles with kilometers when using it.) I'm not the first person to use Copilot to program an Arduino. Anthony Cowley showed how to do it in Abstractions for the Functional Roboticist back in 2013. But he had to write a skeleton of C code around the C generated by Copilot. Amoung other features, arduino-copilot automates generating that C skeleton. So you don't need to remember to enable GPIO pin 13 for output in the setup function; arduino-copilot sees you're using the LED and does that for you. frp-arduino was a big inspiration too, especially how easy it makes it to generate an Arduino sketch withough writing any C. The "=:" operator in copilot-arduino is copied from it. But ftp-arduino contains its own DSL, which seems less capable than Copilot. And when I looked at using frp-arduino for some real world sensing and control, it didn't seem to be possible to integrate it with existing Arduino libraries written in C. While I've not done that with arduino-copilot yet, I did design it so it should be reasonably easy to integrate it with any Arduino library.

• LibreOffice 6.4 RC3 is available

  LibreOffice 6.4 RC3 is available for downloading now. There are builds for all main OS for 64 bit. There is a 32 bit build for Windows also. These builds are only for testing.

Linux For Everyone

Linux is almost like the boogey monster of operating systems. People consider it an OS for hackers and users with advanced computing skills. However, this is not true, most simple operations in Linux are as easy to perform as they are in Windows or MacOS. It should be noted that all Linux distributions are not created equal and it might be best to choose something that is well supported and easy to use. Why switch? There are two big reasons to switch to Linux, the first being it works excellently with older hardware, giving it an extension of life. The second is, it is free, which makes it an excellent alternative to all the paid operating systems out there. Programs on Linux are also free and they are good enough to be used professionally. Now that you are convinced here are six of the best Linux distributions out right now.