Recently, I’ve seen popular articles on macros and metaprogramming in Nimrod and Elixir . Both of these are wonderful metaprogramming systems, to be sure, but I couldn’t help but imagine some in the audience smirking inwardly – and occasionally less inwardly. What odd syntax! How out-of-place they are! If only there…
Peter Bourgon has a web site, and this is that web site.
Mostly software: Rust, machine learning, and P2P systems. Previously, games and cocktails.
These notes are based on the August 27 2018 design draft for generic types in Go2.
I was having lunch with a couple of Haskell programmers the other day and the subject of the ML family came up. I’ve been writing a lot of ML lately and mentioned that I thought *ML was well worth learning for the average Haskeller. When pressed why the best answer I could come up with was “Well.. clean language, Oh!…
Type inference is a major feature of several programming languages, most notably languages from the ML family like Haskell. In this post I want to provide a brief overview of type inference, along with a simple Python implementation for a toy ML-like language.
Traits Deep Dive, Part 2
I’ve been exploring various ways to write parsers. For a long time, I’ve used hand-written recursive descent for its straightforwardness, flexibility, and performance. There is another way—parser generators like Menhir , LALRPOP , or the venerable Bison use the bottom-up LR algorithm .
It seems these days like programming with dependent types in Haskell (and its advantages) is moving slowly but steadily to the mainstream of Haskell programming. In the current state of Haskell education, dependent types are often considered topics for “advanced” Haskell users. However, I can foresee a day where the…
My Rustic Ramblings
During my life as a software engineer there only have been a few occasions where the design and principles of a language struck me as inherently beautiful and consequently inspired me to work with them.
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
λm.me - Compiling Lisp to JavaScript from scratch in 350 LOC
The majority of performance improvements in modern processors are due to increased core count rather than increased instruction execution frequency. To maximise hardware utilization, applications need to use multiple processes and threads. Servers that process discrete requests are a good candidate for both…
After we published this paper, Matthias Hauswirth kindly pointed out similarities between this work and the PL-detective , a body of work that is very closely related that we did not previously know. Less similar but also related---and entertainingly written up---is smeagol . Since we published the paper, we have…
EDIT: As pointed out in the Rust reddit thread, the Rust version can be modified to run faster due to a suble difference between ..=z and ..(z+1). I’ve updated the measurements with rustc0 be…
In previous posts, we covered the most popular implicit use cases. What is left to complete the picture is the mechanics of implicits itself.
As a fun experiment, and to show the basics of clojure development, I implemented a minesweeper clone using clojurescript and p5.js.
Here's a Forth program debugged in KDevelop – a graphical debugger without Forth support:
I looked into Python because I was considering translating the Lisp code for the Russell & Norvig AI textbook into Java. Some instructors and students wanted Java because
Programming is a fundamentally incremental (or gradual) process, and our programming languages should reflect that. I show several ways in which program models transition over time and discuss how future research can further a human-centric vision for programming languages.
In our company we usually have a fun quiz every sunday and this was one of them
I’ve told this story in person dozens of times, it’s time to write it down and share it here. I’ve again experimentally recorded a video version (below), which you can view on a non-Flash device here .
What happens when human error enters into semantic versioning and vgo
