Chris Done

A modest critique of Htmx

At work, we really like the basic simple idea of Htmx. Based on using Htmx in a non-trivial user interface, across a team, we’ve found that the following cases are actually not simple and are quite complicated.

A tiny language called Z

A philosophical difference between Haskell and Lisp (2015)

UPDATE 2020-08-03 : I no longer stand by the content in this post. I think the overall sentiment is marginally accurate; however, the details in the post are incorrect (as many have pointed out over the years).

Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

In 2001, Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote a letter to the Budget Council of The University of Texas. A PDF is available here , I’ve typed it up so that everyone can read it. Sadly, the curriculum was changed to Java . Relatedly, the algorithmic language Scheme was replaced by Python in MIT’s The Structure and Interpretation…

My negative views on Rust (2023)

This is a little summary of my current thoughts on Rust. I wonder whether I’ll look back in five years and see if my views have changed.

A tiny language called Z (2013)

A tiny, strict, impure, curried, dynamically typed (although that may change), partially applied language with rather peculiar syntax.

Client-side web programming in Haskell: A retrospective

At the beginning of this decade (2010), a few of us Haskellers were exploring how best to do client-side web programming. We didn’t want to write JavaScript. There’s a surprising number of techniques we tried to avoid doing so. There was work coming from academia and industry. Here’s a history of my own experience in…

Fay -- A proper subset of Haskell that compiles to Javascript

Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

Within the constraints of the Emacs environment, there are no limits. Emacs is built upon this principle; the Lisp principle. Make some small kernel of features. A substrate. Take care to make this substrate programmable (in any language, Emacs chooses Lisp), and then build the system upon it. Let users worry about…

A Tour of Hell – Shell scripting Haskell dialect

This set of slides sketches out the implementation of Hell , in technical detail. I do tend to switch between the slides, old code, and the present code, so bear with me. It's more about the ideas. If you want to see a complete implementation, the complete implementation of Hell is one file , which you can look…

An alternative Haskell home page

The web site has since been through various iterations and changes, therefore I include some screenshots below for posterity (because my design is much more beautiful than what is now online ;-).

Lisk — Lisp and Haskell