I recently spent a lot of time trying to come up with an interactive data grid widget in Streamlit. It needed to be a bit like Excel: the value you enter in a cell should trigger the recomputation of the value in another cell. At first I assumed it would be relatively easy, but given the powerful state management model at the heart of Streamlit, I found out that it wasn’t. State management for UI programming remains a hard problem, no matter what is the environment. The most difficult aspect of React programming, for instance, is certainly state management. The user-driven asynchronous nature of a UI makes it an inherently difficult problem. ...

Imagine an alternate history in which AI, in the sense of our current LLMs, had come first. This possibly means that things would have looked much more like they did in the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie: computers having a user interface so powerful that you don’t really need anything else (apart from a set of fancy looking dashboards maybe). But this is not what we got. First we got something that looked quite a bit like an idealized “command box” (not vocal though, but textual), with which you could give instructions to the computer, almost as if you were talking to it. But not quite. These instructions had to be expressed in a “language” that the computer could understand, and of course it was far from human natural language. Very close to that command box was the notion of a written program that you could give to the machine, and which would be executed as a kind of chain of commands, in long form, with more elaborate logic and syntax. ...

There’s a cottage industry of AI gurus who extol the virtues of being open about the advent of AI in the enterprise. Don’t be shy about it, AI is powerful enough as it is, and it can already help in the current state of its evolution (mainly, powerful chatbots that have access to certain “tools”, and vendor APIs with which to build some more customized applications, backed by cloud LLMs). ...

I was recently thinking about a dimension of intelligence and the mind that might have played a role in my school results of the past, and also my taste for computer programming. When you are taking an exam, careful management of your time might be a very good skill to possess, in the sense that if you are stuck on a given hard question, it might be preferable to rapidly switch on another one, with the goal of maximizing your overall exam grade, rather than completeness. But for some people, this, in itself, is difficult. ...

3blue1brown recently felt the need to add a supplementary video to its Grover’s algorithm introduction. Apparently, a lot of people have been confused by what I believe is basically just the logical structure of the concept, or why this algorithm is interesting and surprising in the first place. For someone who only knows about classical computing and a little about algorithm complexity, the simplest way to get an intuition about Grover’s algorithm might be to first consider this: ...

I have a friend who wanted to have a quick idea about whether he should use classes and objects for his project. Of course I told him that it depends.. on many aspects. He says that he doesn’t really like tutorials, so here I want to propose something more compact: the skeleton of a Pacman game, just the most basic concepts, without any bells and whistles (so of course not playable, although almost runnable). ...