Hi everyone! It's been a long time since last programming challenge ^list, and here's a nice one I've encountered.

If you search for something like 7km to AU, you'll get your answer. But how is it done? I don't think they hardcoded all 23 units of distance and every conversion factor between them.

If you were programming a conversion system - how would you do it?

First of all, you have input in format that you can specify, for example something like this:

meter kilometer 1000
mile kilometer 1.609344
second minute 60
...

Then you should be able answer queries. For example 7 mile meter should convert 7 miles to meters, which is 11265.41.

Can you design an algorithm that will convert any unit into any other unit?

Edit: Some conversion rates I extracted from wikipedia:

ångström
0.1nm
astronomical unit
149597870700m
attometre
0.000000000000000001m
barleycorn
8.4m
bohr
0.00846
cable length (imperial)
185.3184m
cable length
185.2m
cable length (US)
219.456m
chain (Gunters)
20.11684m
cubit
0.5m
ell
1.143m
fathom
1.8288m
femtometre
0.00000000000001m
fermi
0.00000000000001m
finger
0.022225m
finger (cloth)
0.1143m
foot (Benoit)
0.304799735m
foot (Cape) (H)
0.314858m
foot (Clarke's) (H)
0.3047972654m
foot (Indian) (H)
0.304799514m
foot,metric
0.31622776602m
foot,metric (long)
0.3m
foot,metric (short)
0.30m
foot (International)
0.3048m
foot (Sear's) (H)
0.30479947m
foot (US Survey)
0.304800610
french
0.0003m
furlong
201.168m
hand
0.1016m
inch
0.0254m
league
4828m
light-day
25902068371200m
light-hour
107925284880m
light-minute
17987547480
light-second
299792458m
light-year
31557600light-second
line
0.002116m
link (Gunter's)
0.2011684m
link (Ramsden's; Engineer's)
0.3048m
metre
1m
m
1metre
km
1000m
mickey
0.000127
micrometre
0.000001
mil; thou
0.0000254
mil
10km
mile (geographical)
6082foot (International)
quarter
0.2286m
rod
5.0292m
rope
6.096m
shaku
0.303 0303m
span (H)
0.2286m
stick (H)
0.0508m
toise
1.949 0363m
twip
1.76310
yard
0.9144m

Some of you have read the Typesetting Markdown blog series (https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/). The plan was to finish the last two parts with Annotated Text (basically markup for Markdown) and Figure Drawing (MetaPost); however, people have asked for a post on Markdown to EPUB, others have asked for high-quality PDF theme templates using ConTeXt, and some have requested rendering Markdown into HTML.

Within the realm of Markdown, digital documentation, typesetting with ConTeXt, R, externalized interpolated strings, and bash scripting, what would interest you for the next post in the series?

(Please flip through the blog series to see the topics that have been covered.)

Hey ~, I'm trying to get a programming job. I don't have a degree (I may go to college, but if I do it'll be in a few months), and little work experience. Do you have any tips that could help me have a successful job search?

Here's my resume (somewhat anonymized). I tried to focus on experience I've gained from creating open-source projects to show the skills that I have. I've made sure that all the projects listed have demos, screenshots, usage instructions, etc. Any advice on how I could improve it would be appreciated.

Thanks!

It'd my understanding that C has stuck around in the UNIX world for so long, nearly half a century, mostly due to the inertia of legacy code.

If you could snap your fingers and magically port/fork the entire stack of open source codebases to the language of your choice, which would you pick and why?

For those who haven't seen my essay-length posts in the past, I occasionally like to delve into explaining different programming concepts, particularly with regards to making your code easier to manage. Sometimes this has to do with how you structure you code and projects, and at others it has to do with how you think about the problems you're solving. I've been in the mood to write up on yet another programming subject, but nothing in particular has stood out to me lately during the course of my work.

With that in mind, I figured I would take a different approach and see if anyone here had some specific requests for content they would like to see. Requests from all levels of experience are welcome!

(And for those who are itching to do a write-up on any of the requests that appear here, feel free to call dibs!)

Edit

For those who want to take a dive into my previous submissions, you can now find them in the new wiki entry created by @cfabbro or directly via the programming.code_quality_tips tag here.

https://gitlab.com/smoores/pliant

I’ve been a software developer for about three years, and I’ve always been enticed by and passionate about the open source scene. I have an assortment of projects variously available on GitHub and GitLab, but this is the first time I’ve ever created an open source project intended to be used by others.

Pliant is a barebones starter kit for anyone wanting to self host their own blog. It came out of my own efforts to start a blog, and it’s what currently powers https://tfhe.shanemoore.me.

I’d love to hear you’re feedback, or just discuss open source, blogging, web technologies, or whatever else comes up.

What are you coding? Or are you reading a CS paper?

and of course, have you read SICP today?

                             ___-------___
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 /|  O|| O|        /      \_______________/        \
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|          \    /      /                    \          \
|   (_______) /______/                        \_________ \
|         / /         \                      /            \
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     \       ||------_-~~-_ ------------- \ --/~   ~\    || __/
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