Blogs / Personal blogs

Ian Henry

ianthehenry.com

I had another idea for a musical instrument, and I think it worked out pretty well.

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Software Engineering 11Tools & Productivity 5Programming Languages 4Math & Algorithms 1Hardware & Electronics 1Games & Graphics 1

1

Why Janet? (2023)

I never thought it could happen to me. I mean, parentheses? In this day and age? But for the past couple years, my go-to programming language for fun side projects has been a little Lisp dialect called Janet. (print "hey janet") I like Janet so much that I wrote an entire book about it, and put it on The Internet for…

2

Janet for Mortals (2023)

I wrote a book. It’s called Janet for Mortals, and it’s free, and it’s on the internet, and you can read it right now. And you should read it right now, instead of reading this blog post, because this blog post is not very interesting if you haven’t read the book. Heck, this blog post is not very interesting even if…

3

The Problem with Macros

So we’re supposed to be writing a game, right? But in order to make progress, we have to fix a bug. And in order to fix the bug, we have to write a test. And in order to write a test, we have to write a test framework. And in order to write a test framework, we have to understand a thing or two about macros. Okay. So…

4

Quote-unquote "macros"

You’ve probably seen this Python 101 thing before: @memoized def fib(n): if n <= 1: return n return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2) Leaving aside the absurdity of computing Fibonacci numbers recursively, it’s a common first introduction to Python decorators and higher-order functions. fib is just a function, and memoized…