What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

Code is usually version controlled nowadays in git or some other VCS. These typically operate on text files and record the changes applied to the files over their history. One drawback from this is that formatting of the code can introduce changesbto the files that make no semantic difference, e.g. newlines are added/removed, indentation is altered etc.

Consistent formatting makes the code easier to read, but the style used is an aesthetic preference. There might be objective reasons for readability in at least the extreme cases, but in many cases the formatting is purely a preferred style.

If we instead version controlled code in the form of an abstract syntax tree (AST) (possibly even as just a series of transformations on that tree), we could have any formatting we'd like! When editing the code we would just be changing a projection of the AST and when we've made our changes the transformations could be made to the stored AST. If two languages shared the same AST the choice of language even becomes a choice for the programmer. Sadly this has some limitations since ASTs are usually language specific... But we could possibly take this a step further.

Could we take a compiled binary and use that as the basis for generating an AST? This is essentially what decompilers do. For heavily optimized code this is severely limited, but for debug builds a lot of extra information is retained in the binary that can be utilized to construct a sensible representation. This way of storing code the language used becomes a style preference! Code compiled from one language might become alien when viewed in another language (thinking of lazy Haskell code viewed in C), but maybe that is a corner case?

There are issues when considering binaries for different platforms. A binary for the JVM isn't the same as one for ARM64 or one compiled to run on an x86. So there are some limitations there...

One (very) good thing about storing code as text files is the ubiquity of software capable of viewing and editing text. It would however be cool if we could make programming language a stylistic preference that is compatible with other languages! At least the AST part should be perfectly achievable.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This thread is posted Monday/Wednesday/Friday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.

Basically the title. Do you now, or have you ever tracked your time to try to measure where it all goes? I've been feeling a little unproductive lately, and have heard anecdotally that keeping a log of time spent can be useful for realigning your priorities. I'm checking out a bunch of different apps and services, but also just curious to know if anybody has had any joy with this sort of thing?

If you currently track your time, what do you use; are there things that you don't bother tracking; and do you feel like it's a useful tool?

If you have in the past but don't anymore, same questions, but also why did you stop?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

As I spent some time recently clearing out my closet, I looked longingly at my keyboard that I purchased with the intent of learning and practicing while working from home, as well to my ant farm kit where I had unsuccessfully kept a queen and small colony for a few months until they died several years ago. I'm sure we all have these tokens of failed experiments or forays into hobbies that once seemed interesting but we ended up losing interest in.

What are yours? Why were you initially interested in it and why did you stop?

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

This thread is posted Monday/Wednesday/Friday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!