On the upside, the blog collects less personal data directly (GDPR) and the security risk is shifted by outsourcing it to a controller like Disqus, GitHub, Reddit or HN. The downside is the dependency on an external moderator, vendor lock-in, ads, tracking etc. WordPress supports Markdown blocks.

So, for the first group, the matheux, as the French say, the focus is primarily on mathematics as a tool for computations and verification, whereas the true mathematician seeks the elegance of abstraction. Of course, people can fall somewhere in between and modern languages are quite multi-paradigm.

I think people with a more applied (polytechnic) background tend to prefer imperative languages (C++, MATLAB, FORTRAN, Julia, etc.), while those with a more theoretical or abstract background are naturally drawn to logical/functional/declarative languages (Haskell, Lisp, Prolog, etc.)

Not long ago we were talking about GraalVM Native and now Oracle says Graal will focus more on non-Java languages, while AOT efforts for Java move under Leyden. blogs.oracle.com/java/post/de.... While I had fun building a toy Docker TUI with Lanterna, generating reflect config won't be missed.

Thanks for the post. haven’t used Scala in production, only for learning. I like its pragmatic direction, it aligns with the JVM. But with TypeScript for Node and GraalVM for native, does Scala multiplatform still have a strong market fit? Same thing for Kotlin and other languages that bet on that.

However, both parts now run in less than 2 seconds.

Go (cached) solution: https://github.com/bgbernovici/advent-of-code/blob/main/Go/2023/day12/day12.go
Go (snail-paced) solution: https://github.com/bgbernovici/advent-of-code/blob/main/Go/2023/day12_uncacheable/day12_uncacheable.go

#adventofcode

Go solution (with Dijkstra's shortest path, only part 1): https://github.com/bgbernovici/advent-of-code/blob/main/Go/2023/day11_dijkstra/day11_dijkstra.go

Dijkstra works well on the provided sample, but once the personalized matrix scales, it quickly becomes unfeasible.

I solved it in the end, as the community suggested, with LCM. (~4ms)

Go solution: https://github.com/bgbernovici/advent-of-code/blob/main/Go/2023/day8/day8.go

#adventofcode

Nowhere close to ideal, but they yield the correct results in the end.

One often overlooked quality of the Swift programming language is how easily it can consume C libraries, and more recently , since Swift 5.9, even C++ libraries. There isn't much impedance mismatch.

Source: https://github.com/bgbernovici/myndsmith

Source can be found at https://github.com/bgbernovici/word-guesser