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Take the following code: a = 1 a = a + 1 print(a) A common FP critique of imperative programming goes like this: “How can a = a + 1? That’s like saying 1 = 2. Mutable assignment makes no sense.” This is a notation mismatch: “equals” should mean “equality”, when it really means “assign”. I agree with this criticism and…
The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of…
Let's make the CPython team regret adding pattern matching to Python!
I want to do $THING. Normally I do my hacking in Python, which is okay but has lots of frustrations. My friends tell me $LANGUAGE is better for doing $THING. After going through the online tutorial, I can see why. Maybe I’ll try $LANGUAGE for this project! Just a few things I need to figure out first: How do I install…
Kenneth Iverson’s 1964 language, APL, won him the Turing Award. His award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought, argued that better notations would lead people to deeper insights about mathematics. He provided a number of examples ranging across linear algebra, arithmetic, probability, and logic. Unfortunately, most…
This is the companion reference for A Brief Introduction to Esoteric Languages, my lecture for a friend’s college class. The video should be legible to other viewers, and the material here should be (mostly) understandable without watching the video. The Esolangs Listed roughly in order of appearance in the talk, with…