Ruby Insights, Learning Journey, and Cultural Exploration
While reading the Advent of Prism about the new Ruby parser that’s now been integrated into runtimes and tooling I came across something that I had overlooked:
Numbers such as 010 are treated by Ruby as Octal by default
I completely forgot about this, mainly because I don’t often use octals - honestly never - so I did a small research about it and the reason behind this can be traced back to the C programming language and according to this Stack Overflow post it’s a convention that’s been introduce by [B Programming language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language) The historical reason behind treating numbers with a leading 0 as octal in some programming languages, including Ruby, can be traced back to the influence of the C programming language.
In the C programming language, a numeric literal with a leading 0 is treated as an octal constant. This behavior was likely introduced to provide a convenient way to represent octal values directly in the source code. For example, in C:
int octalNumber = 0123; // This represents the octal value of 83
a similar behaviour can be found in C++. C#, Java, JavaScript.
I’ve started learning touch typing, so far it’s been quite challenging and it needs a lot of practice and discipline. I’m honestly enjoying it and is likely one of those skills that could boost my self confidence. I’m following the free lessons at Typing Club
I’m making progress in my French studies on Duolingo and I’ve noticed that I’m now able to understand most of the material I’m reading as an aid to my lessons. Obviously I’m still at a beginner level and mainly using present tense. The journey is still long, but so far it’s been really interesting. Talking about languages I’ve also enrolled in a Friulian course. It’s a minority language spoken in the Italian region I’m from and even if I can understand it, like most of the people living there, I can’t speak it properly. Now is the time to fill this gap. It’s part of my culture and in some way it had influenced who I currently am, so definitely worth learning it.
I find the new iPhone journal app quite nice. It prompts some cool suggestions and it’s a way to keep track what you’ve done during the day or more than one if you’re not using it daily. I believe journalling is something than can help organise your thoughts and reflections at a moment in time.
Things I like - in random order
If you’re looking for a definition of beauty here it is:
Today’s Links
Why all the coffee shops looks the same on The Guardian
Why more Brits feel unhappy at work Blue Monday
OpenAI changes policy to allow military operations
The Boeing’s plug door fiasco
A Github repository about principles and patterns for software developers Hacker Laws