DEV Community: Boris Orekhov

Programming as text creation

Boris Orekhov — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 07:45:26 +0000

I am a philologist and I need to write texts: scientific papers, popularization articles. But sometimes I want to write code. I often treat code as natural language texts. Just as sometimes you want to try your hand at a new genre, you want to leave behind and offer the community code in a programming language that is not your primary language.

I used to write a lot in Perl, it was my second language, but now I've thoroughly forgotten it. However, for sentimental reasons I'd like to have Perl code in my github account, so I had to remember it.

I tried using ChatGPT to accomplish the task I wanted, but never got the results I wanted. I had to write code the old fashioned way and work out the rules of the language.

I plan to write some more applications (useful and just beautiful) in different programming languages in the near future and make them available to the public.

Font licensing

Boris Orekhov — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 09:29:00 +0000

A few years ago I created a font.

I would like it to be open and free for distribution. This is unusual because most fonts are paid for. I was faced with the problem of choosing a license for the font. Fonts have their own licenses, and they are not supposed to be free to distribute. It seemed appropriate to me to use a license that included the font as part of the software, because fonts are now electronic and used on websites.

In general, I would like to use the GNU General Public License v3.0 (+ Commercial use, + Distribution, √ License and copyright notice, √ Same license), but I haven't seen such cases, it doesn't seem to be common.

Possible topics for Python podcast

Boris Orekhov — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 00:12:00 +0000

I taught programming to humanities students for many years. This is also something we can sometimes talk about within the programming community.

What can you focus on in such a conversation?

Here's an outline for a conversation plan:

Why should humanities students learn python? Common problems that are solved by code.
Why Python and not R or Fortran? What libraries are in demand for humanitarians?
What are the differences in learning to develop for humanitarians, what are the challenges faced? Language barrier.
Does GPT work? What do the humanities think about it?
Esoteric programming languages from a humanist's point of view
Poems in programming code
What do natural language and programming language have in common? Python as a foreign language

Scientific problems are not real problems for programmers

Boris Orekhov — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 00:02:00 +0000

In 2020, a rather famous person wrote to me through one service for sharing scientific papers. This person is a programmer.

First, she asked about the Master's program at our university, whether it was worth going there. We also talked about the website that this person had created. The site is very famous and useful.
Then, as part of my reflections, I suggested thinking about adding some functionality to this site. This functionality would have to be at the backend level, and would require the implementation of free third-party libraries.

This idea seemed unfortunate to my interlocutor. She did not want to implement any third-party code. But the main thing is that I heard a number of insults against me. According to her, I did not understand the subject of the conversation.

To show that I had studied the subject of the conversation, I went to the site and, opening the source code of the page, discovered the use of jQuery there.

In my opinion, this was already an implementation of someone else's library. To this I received an even greater stream of insults.

One of the ways to hurt me, which my interlocutor chose, was to attack my abilities as a programmer. “You are not a real programmer, you just use programming for your small scientific tasks, and you don't understand anything”.

This is true, by the way, I am not a real programmer and I write academic code which is much worse in quality than the one created in the industry.

But the most interesting thing here is the contrast between my “little science tasks” and the apparently big and serious stuff that programming is actually for.