ActiveState Blog

Machine learning is often held out as a magical solution to hard problems that will absolve us mere humans from ever having to actually learn anything. But in reality, for data scientists and machine learning engineers, there are a lot of problems that are much more difficult to deal with than simple object recognition in images, or playing board games with finite rule sets.

The best way to learn something, for me at least, is to dive in head first and just do it. And while I’ve been programming for most of my life now, I’m a relative newcomer to the Go world. To truly grasp some of concepts, I wanted to take on a small, contained project that I could realistically complete.

For many programmers, syntax highlighting has become almost a necessity when writing code. With syntax highlighting enabled, it is easy to spot the basic syntactic typos made, identify where exactly a multi-line string ends, and quickly identify landmarks in a chunk of code (e.g. function definitions, variable names, etc.).

It is easy for the modern-day coder to take syntax highlighting for granted in his or her developer tools like Komodo IDE. However, syntax highlighted source code shared over the internet is not a given.

As you may or may not know, Komodo is based on Mozilla, same as Firefox. You might even say Komodo is based on Firefox. As you may also know, Firefox has a very flexible addon system. In fact, there are very few areas of Firefox that you cannot customize with an Addon. People have written entire applications inside of Firefox, and entire applications have been written on top of Firefox's foundation--Thunderbird, Selenium, Postbox and of course Komodo, to name a few.

Many organizations stopped upgrading Perl after the release of 5.8.8 or 5.10.1, about 8 to 11 years ago. At that point in history, major releases of Perl could take many years to come to fruition. To make things more confusing, point releases of a given version sometimes contained large changes (including backwards incompatibilities) that we'd expect in major releases. For example, 5.10.1, released 20 months after 5.10, contained a number of backwards incompatibilities and quite a few new features.