This Week I Learned: 2022W36

After a few weeks of holidays, I’m back! :)

CSS

You can now control how the page breaks during scrolling only with CSS (no Javascript needed), thanks to scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-align. Source here.

Randomness

The pseudorandom number generator used by PHP, Python, Ruby, Matlab or Excel is the same. It’s called Mersenne Twister. I still struggle to understand 1% of the Wikipedia article because of my total lack of Math knowledge.

Airtags - Apple - Privacy

I just heard about Airtags. Supposedly launched to help you find your keys or other items. It seems like it has been used for malevolant purposes. You can check this Guardian article here. I find it really disturbing.

Git

Git History allows you to easily see the changes in a Git file. Just replace github (or gitlab) in the URL with githistory.xyz. For example: This Symfony file and its history. Obviously doesn’t work with private repositories, but quite interesting! I like the visual representation.

Partial - Currying

When diving into the Python functools module, I realized I stumbled upon the partial function. I was a bit confused because I thought partial was the same as currying.

It seems it’s two different concepts (even if it’s still quite narrow to me).

You can check an article about the differences here.

PHP - Partial Function Application

There is no way to easily make a partial function in PHP. An RFC was proposed but was rejected.

If you want to achieve it, you will need to create your own partial application. One implementation example:

<?php

function add(int $x, int $y, int $z) {
    return $x + $y + $z;
}

function partial(callable $fn, ...$args) {
    $newCallable = function (...$newArgs) use ($fn, $args) {
        $finalArgs = array_merge($args, $newArgs);

        return $fn(...$finalArgs);
    };

    return $newCallable;
}

$add2 = partial(add(...), 2);
$add3 = partial($add2(...), 1);

$add3(2); // 5

Here we use the (...) notation, introduced in PHP 8.1.