In particular, check out Lua Carousel , a lightweight programming environment for desktop and mobile devices.
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I like plain text. I also like doodling while I write. Some things are just easier to explain with a picture. But if I need to draw a picture today, I need to stop writing plain text, pick an app, dismiss a couple of dialogs or tours of new features in front of my face, think about all the ways it's acting for its…
Most programmers agree that we don't read enough code. The interviews in Peter Seibel's book, “Coders at work” highlight a comical contradiction: almost all the programmers interviewed by Seibel recommend that others read code for fun, but none of them routinely do so themselves. Seibel even asked Hal Abelson (of SICP…
I talk a lot here about using computers freely , how to select programs to use, how to decide if a program is trustworthy infrastructure one can safely depend on in the long term. I also spend my time building such infrastructure, because there isn't a lot of it out there. As I do so, I'm always acutely aware that I'm…
[ Update Nov 27: This post had issues, and I retract some of my more provocative claims. See the errata at the end. ]
"Software libraries suck. Here's why, in a sentence: they promise to be abstractions, but they end up becoming services. An abstraction frees you from thinking about its internals every time you use it. A service allows you to never learn its internals. A service is not an abstraction. It isn't 'abstracting' away the…
The most important step is the first one. Humanity didn't get good at building houses by building the same house a million times. We built lots of different houses and learned from each other's failures. Gravitating away from monopolies is a way everyone can help improve software, regardless of our abilities or needs.
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by…
Over the past year I've been working on a minimal-dependency hobbyist computing stack (everything above the processor) called Mu . The goal is to:
In the previous post , I described what my new hobbyist computing stack looks like today, and how the design decisions seemed to accumulate inevitably from a small set of axiomatic goals. In this post I describe some (far more speculative) future plans for Mu and try to articulate how the design process continues to…