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A few weeks ago, on a whim my friend and I decided to hackathon our way through an app to help us learn how to play guitar . In a stroke of inspiration, we decided to learn something new, and do the project in the Elm programming language , about which I had heard many good things.
I’ve spent a good deal of my professional life arguing against using protobuffers. They’re clearly written by amateurs, unbelievably ad-hoc, mired in gotchas, tricky to compile, and solve a problem that nobody but Google really has. If these problems of protobuffers remained quarantined in serialization abstractions…
Isn’t it weird that we treat source code as text? That is, we have this extremely well-structured and strongly-typed object — the abstract syntax tree — that exists conceptually in our minds, and in actuality inside of our compiler, but for some reason we pretend it’s just a pile of bytes and edit it byte-by-byte…
When asked about the virtues of Haskell’s strong type system, most people will say the best part is that it lets you refactor with a zen-like tranquility, or that it stops your program from crashing at runtime. I mean, those are both great. But my favorite part is that having a strong type system means I don’t need to…
Usually I write about solutions to problems I’ve worked out, but I’ve found myself increasingly becoming interesting in where solutions come from. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Boorstin’s excellent The Discoverers , which I’d strongly recommend.