Durwasa Chakraborty

Welcome to my world, where code, chords, and couplets dance together in harmony.

Major Mode El

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. Before you think I’m crowning Lisp as God’s own language after just one blog stint at a coding exercise, hold your horses. I’m not here to bash Object-Oriented Programming or its design patterns. In fact, I believe it’s crucial to know these patterns inside out. Only then can you play the game of ‘Design Pattern or Anti-Pattern?...

January 6, 2024 · durwasa

STR: A Disciplined Programmer

A trainee undergoing military training can disassemble and assemble a machine gun within a minute. At first, this might seem very complex, but everyone in the academy manages to do it. The more pertinent question is not ‘how’ but ‘why’. It’s because their lives depend on it. Similarly, a disciplined programmer learns the vocabulary and syntax of a programming language with utmost sincerity. Every word in the programming language is sacred, and any non-conformance is akin to blasphemy....

durwasa

The 00 Estate: What Happens When the Government Dictates How to Write Code?

In the House of Commons of Great Britain, Edmund Burke once stated, “There were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than them all.” As the 21st century dawned, we observed media houses displaying biases towards their respective lobbies. The ’truth,’ which should be absolute, now has shades of well-crafted absolution. “Whose truth is the truth?” is a question I often ask myself while reading news articles on the internet....

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The Glass Wall

An extraordinary year comes to an end, just like many others, yet I distinctly remember that one year when a remarkable entourage of human beings gathered around me. I had hoped our story would have a happy ending, but sometimes wishes don’t come true. Now, staring at the glass wall, I see only myself, alone, burdened with a heavy bag of despair and endless remorse. The seeds I had sown were now bearing their bitter fruit....

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