PinkLetter - Solving Your Own Problems (and Messy Polish Grammar)

Ciao!

Have you ever coded a solution to a painful problem of yours?

Shockingly, I’ve never done so.

However, I’ve been training myself to be aware of my own problems recently. Well, the ones I can solve with software at least.

A few weeks ago, while reading a manga in Polish, I found myself looking for a word on three different websites. One for the translation, another one for an example, and the third one for the declination.

(Then, I realize I could not make any sense of the Polish grammar. But it’s another story.)

Usually, I would have come back to the comic and continued reading. But this I noticed something: pain. The kind I could address in code!

The application I developed is still in the I-pray-nobody-will-open-this-link phase. But it’s at least as good as what I was using before. Plus, I threw in the mix a couple of additional nice-to-have.

Should you be up for a zero-CSS adventure, visit http://rysiex.herokuapp.com and query for sikać. The picture won’t disappoint!

Elsewhere on the Web

No, dynamic type systems are not inherently more open by Alexis King

Internet debates about typing disciplines continue to be plagued by a pervasive myth that dynamic type systems are inherently better at modeling “open world” domains. The argument usually goes like this: the goal of static typing is to pin everything down as much as possible, but in the real world, that just isn’t practical. Real systems should be loosely coupled and worry about data representation as little as possible, so dynamic types lead to a more robust system in the large.

(Riccardo: What an elegant and kind debunk!)

10 bad TypeScript habits to break this year by Daniel Bartholomae

TypeScript and JavaScript have steadily evolved over the last years, and some of the habits we built over the last decades have become obsolete. Some might never have been meaningful. Here’s a list of 10 habits that we all should break.

(Riccardo: Solid, simple, sensible tips that you can start using tomorrow. They will make your TypeScript code excellent.)

Minimalism versus Types by Hisham

We love minimalistic languages because they let us do so much with so little. But when we start doing a lot with them, often we start yearning for types to help us make sense of it all. Adding types to a minimalistic language (well, adding anything!) makes it larger. Is this worth the price? Is a rich type system antithetical to minimalism? Let’s find out!

(Riccardo: Dynamic languages have huge and complex type-systems. Unfortunately, it’s all in your head. If you liked this one, be sure to check the follow-up too!)