Haha indeed. At work suddenly documentation and APIs are important, but it's all for/behind "skills". Before it was always "sure, that would be nice"...

I do welcome the improvements to doc and APIs this brings though!

Could you have a heuristics based on the input size and the pattern to decide what to use?

Yes, this is entirely possible. you can even explore the automaton eagerly and detect if it's possible to loop from an accepting state to a nonaccepting one.

Exciting stuff for future work

Ripgrep does something like thhis. It has a meta regex engine that switches engine when it finds what looks like pathological cases (or rather, the regex-automata crate does, which is used by the regex crate, which powers ripgrep).

https://docs.rs/regex-automata/latest/regex_automata/meta/st...

Ripgrep in turn exposes some knobs to tweak the heuristics

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#how...

They do, but the US can still force them to hand over data that's in EU. (This was confirmed by Microsoft France officials.)

At least in Belgium it's quite common for a lot of students to fail the first year (partly due to the difficulty, partly due to partying instead of studying). But it's not like it's really free, the tuition is cheap but the accomodation is expensive. I also don't think it's particularly difficult on purpose to filter out students, it's just that it's not overly expensive and a lot of people are unsure about what to study.

According to [1] at one Belgian university 61.8% of students reached a milestone within 2 years (with 41.4% reaching it within 1 year)

That's quite a high non-completion rate - but it's nowhere near 99%.

[1] https://nieuws.kuleuven.be/en/content/2023/42-6-of-new-stude...

If you're porting a library, you can use the original implementation as an 'oracle' for your tests. Which means you only need a way to write/generate inputs, then verify the output matches the original implementation.

It doesn't work for everything of course but it's a nice way to bug-for-bug compatible rewrites.

Indeed, the Tcl implementation does this so e.g. `set d [dict] ; dict set d key value` can modify d in place instead of creating a copy (since everything is immutable).

You could use this funky tool from oss-rebuild which proxies registries so they return the state they were at a past date: https://github.com/google/oss-rebuild/tree/main/cmd/timewarp

That... looks like it would let me do this exactly the way I want to for npm and python. For my C++ stuff, it's all vendored and manual anyway.

I had not seen that tool. Thanks for pointing it out.

There's Hedy if you want to try a text based programming language for kids: https://www.hedy.org/

What actually happens if you remove read permissions on the /nix/store directory? Do things still work? I suppose I'll need to try!

https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/blob/master/rfcs/0097-no-read-... is relevant.

Oh hmm did we never implement this? We should. Both because it is a good idea, and because accepted RFCs should be implemented.

I'm not aware of it being done yet. But since the RFC is accepted it should be pretty straightforward.

I wish a Python package manager would support patching dependencies, like e.g. Cargo allows: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/overriding-depende...

It's much cleaner than monkey patching, and it will more likely detect if an update conflicts with your patching.

I've used it by packaging everything through nix, but that can be cumbersome.