The “true” program does nothing; it merely exits with a zero exit status. This can be done with an empty file that’s marked executable, and that’s what it was in the earliest unix system libraries. Such an empty file will be interpreted as a shell script that does nothing, and since it does this successfully, the shell exits with a zero exit status. — The /bin/true Command and Copyright

Let’s write a compiler, part 1.

Here’s an interesting list of resources in addition to StatLib: Statistics, Statistical Computing, and Mathematics.

Computational Statistics in Python. #python

Exploring Clang/LLVM optimization on programming horror. #clang

I am one of those people who came to Racket because it is a Lisp. I feel that I should be better at creating/using software and general problem solving than I am, and I guess you could say I am looking for the fabled Lisp enlightenment. Maybe saying Lisp is the language of the gods is overwrought, but nobody ever said that JavaScript made them smarter, or that they learned a lot using anything by Microsoft. — Thoughts On Lisp And Racket

See comments and interesting side discussions on Hacker News.

Fun with regular expressions: part I. Actually, it’s quite an interesting read since this post is just a succession of C code, interesting to read by the way, based on DFA representations of regexes.

Fuschia on the balcony

Programming Idioms. Interesting to quickly compare the syntax of different PLs to perform the same task.

TIL that <C-R>. (mind the leading dot) allow to paste the last piece of inserted text. #vim