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PHP in 2019
PHP isn't the same old crappy language it was ten years ago
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Go is Google's language, not ours
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml
During my final term at UWaterloo I took the CS444 compilers class with a project to write a compiler from a substantial subset of Java to x86, in teams of up to three people with a language of the group’s choice. This was a rare opportunity to compare implementations of large programs that all did the same thing…
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Parse, Don’t Validate
Historically, I’ve struggled to find a concise, simple way to explain what it means to practice type-driven design. Too often, when someone asks me “How did you come up with this approach?” I find I can’t give them a satisfying answer. I know it didn’t just come to me in a vision—I have an iterative design process…
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Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them
This article has been translated into Spanish: Por qué debes aprender más lenguajes de programación (incluso si no los vas a utilizar)
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Modern C, Second Edition
A new edition of the book Modern C and much more are now available under a CC license via the following page This edition is the result of a collaboration with Manning, and improves a lot over the…
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Ten Years of Erlang
For my ten years in the Erlang community, I decided to cover a few topics such as hype phases and how this related to Erlang, the ladder of ideas within the language and how that can impact adoption, what changed in my decade there, and what I think Erlang still has to bring to the programming community at large.
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قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
قلب is a programming language exploring the role of human culture in coding. Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. It is implemented as a tree-walking language interpreter in JavaScript.
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Some Obscure C Features
Pancakes and computers
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Why Go and Not Rust?
What's the role of Go in a universe where Rust exists?
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How to not rewrite it in Rust
Once you get past the growing pains of the Borrow Checker and realise Rust gives you the power to do things which would be unheard of (or just plain dangerous) in other languages, the temptation to Rewrite it in Rust can be quite strong. However at best, the temptation to RiiR is unproductive (unnecessary duplication…
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Thoughts on Rust bloat
I’m about to accept a PR that will increase druid’s compile time about 3x and its executable size almost 2x. In this case, I think the tradeoff is worth it (without localization, a GUI toolkit is strictly a toy), but the bloat makes me unhappy and I think there is room for improvement in the Rust ecosystem.
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From Design Patterns to Category Theory (2017)
How do you design good abstractions? By using abstractions that already exist.
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I'm writing a book about algorithms and Lisp
Drago — a nice example of a real-world binary tree This was the first post about my book on algorithms and Lisp. Writing it, actually, st...
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Moving from Go to PHP Again
After two years on Go, moving our shop applications back to PHP.
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Elements of Clojure
Daniel: 00:00:00 Hello, welcome to the REPL, a podcast diving into Clojure programs and libraries. This week, I’m talking about Clojure with Zach Tellman, the creator of Manifold and Elements of Clojure, a recent book about Clojure. Welcome to the show, Zach.
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The Value in Go’s Simplicity
After using Go for a couple years, I’ve really come to appreciate its simplicity. I started writing Go at work a couple months ago, and have found it really easy to iterate on – much more so than Python and Java.
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Let's Build a Compiler
Compilers, interpreters, runtimes, and the like can sometimes feel vaguely magical. They take your code, perform complex transformations that you only partially understand, and spit out an executable binary. Clearly, the inner workings of such a beast must contain arcane secrets, not meant for the minds of mortals.
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Algebraic Structures: Things I wish someone had explained about FP
Algebraic Structures are something I wish I’d understood better, sooner. I had a hazy idea of what they were, but didn’t know the correct terminology. That was a massive barrier to finding out more. This article is my attempt to stop that happening to others. We’ll look at: What are algebraic structures? How do we use…
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I Built a Lisp Compiler
I’m very proud to announce the completion of my first programming language compiler! Malcc is an incremental and ahead-of-time lisp compiler written in C. This is the story of my progress over the years and what I learned in the process. An alternate title for this post is: “How to Write a Compiler in Ten Years or…
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A final proposal for Rust await syntax
This is an announcement regarding the resolution of the syntax for the await operator in Rust. This is one of the last major unresolved questions blocking the stabilization of the async/await feature, a feature which will enable many more people to write non-blocking network services in Rust. This post contains…
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Go Slices Are Fat Pointers
One of the frequent challenges in C is that pointers are nothing but a memory address. A callee who is passed a pointer doesn’t truly know anything other than the type of object being pointed at, which says some things about alignment and how that pointer can be used… maybe. If it’s a pointer to void ( void * ) then…
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Bytecode compilers and interpreters
Two fun things happened recently and the proximity of the two made something go click in my head and now I think I understand how bytecode interpreters work.
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I love coding in C
For the first time in almost a year, I brushed up on my C fundamentals and built a few toy programs. As I played around with pointers and printed out a memory location, I experienced a literal chill down my spine. I had almost forgotten how marvelous programming in this language was.
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Why Racket? Why Lisp?
Beautiful Racket
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Do you have a problem? Write a compiler
These are notes of the talk I gave at ClojuTre 2019 . There is a video recording of the talk , and the slide deck as a PDF .