This article describes some practices that I follow to make my Haskell code easier to read. In general, these practices allow readers to determine where types, functions, etc. are defined without having to use an IDE or other tooling. In particular, the benefits are as follows: The code is easier to…

Initial Commit Stephen Ramsay So, is blogging cool again? I’m reminded of an old joke. A student asks a professor, “You know what’d be cool?” The professor replies, “Now, how would I know a thing like that?” Not quite a diary (still less a “log”), but not quite a collection of formal essays … This…

Why numbering should start at zero To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us a) 2 ≤ i < 13 b) 1 < i ≤ 12 c) 2 ≤ i ≤ 12 d) 1 < i < 13 Are there reasons to prefer one convention to the other? Yes, there are. The…

by Matthias Felleisen 16 Dec 2024 a not entirely fictional conversation Changed in version 1.0: Mon Dec 16 19:27:54 EST 2024: initial release As of Fall 2025, Northeastern’s College of Computer Science will replace the existing curriculum with a set of new courses, starting with Python in the first…

graydon2In a recent podcast about Rust leadership, the BDFL question came up again and Jeremy Soller said (in the understatement of the century) that "I believe Graydon would have said no to some things we all like now". And this echoes a different conversation on reddit where I was reminded that I…

OpenBSD's and FreeBSD's PF system has a very convenient 'pflog' feature, where you put in a 'log' bit in a PF rule and this dumps a copy of any matching packets into a pflog pseudo-interface, where you can both see them with 'tcpdump -i pflog0' and have them automatically logged to disk by pflogd in…

An Introduction To Lispy Pattern Matching 2013-04-19 07:20 +0000 It is evident that Lispers like to keep their data in lists. In fact, they like lists so much that they even keep their code in lists! And sometimes they use lists when they shouldn't, e.g. when they really should be using maps or…

I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are new to the industry. Another is the Twitter-optimized “you’re a terrible engineer if you ever store booleans in a database” clever trick1.…

Chicken: Define-Foreign-Enum-Type, Typedef, and Pointers In the course of writing Chicken Scheme bindings for a certain C library, I came across a tricky problem: how do you write a binding for a function that takes a pointer to a typedef enum type? Here is an example of the situation I mean: We…

Disclosure: Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android 📢 UPDATE: As of June 3rd 7:45 CEST, Meta/Facebook Pixel script is no longer sending any packets or requests to localhost. The code responsible for sending the _fbp cookie has been almost completely removed. Yandex has also stopped the…

“Impractical”, “academic”, “niche”. These are a few of the reactions I get when someone discovers that my favourite programming language is Haskell, and not only my favourite in some sort of intellectually-masturbatory way, but favourite for building things, real things, mostly involving web…

Table of Contents The following is a primer for the Scheme family of programming languages. It was originally written to aid newcomers to technology being developed at The Spritely Institute but is designed to be general enough to be readable by anyone who is interested in Scheme. This document is…

Okay, by now pretty much everyone is probably sick of hearing about Terminal Phase. Terminal Phase this, and Terminal Phase that! Weren't you getting back to other hacking on Spritely Goblins, Chris? And in fact I am, I just decided it was a good idea to demo one of the things that makes Goblins…

How I learned Haskell in just 15 years by Evan Silberman, Duckrabbit Solutions Haskell is a programming language invented sometime in the 20th century by Scottish logicians as a prank.¹ Fifteen years or so ago, for reasons I can no longer remotely recall, I started learning Haskell. Now, I have…

Lisp is not the most popular language. It never was. Other general purpose languages are more popular and ultimately can do everything that Lisp can (if Church and Turing are correct). They have more libraries and a larger user community than Lisp does. They are more likely to be installed on a…

(An old Google Japan Apr 1 gag.) Other fine specimens include: And these bitches: Of course I grew up with:

The multitude of devices and the capabilities of modern web browsers have given rise to many capable technologies. But in most cases they only they create unnecessary complexity, and nightmares to the historians of the future. Evolution is not an endgame, it is a process; ancient sponges can live…

Don’t Make a Blog, Make a Brain Dump 2022-09-10 Not enough people have personal blogs. This is a point brought up by many of those passionate about the “golden age” in the timeline of the modern internet. A time when websites were more like a small collection of winding side-streets and flea…

2019-07-05 There was a time on the Internet when websites wore badges of honor, declaring that their code was semantic and followed the W3C guidelines. The validators we used weren’t great (and still aren’t perfect) but they represented a community that took pride in caring about the quality of…

The web has lost a great battle, one that it was never given a chance to fight for. Apps got the upper hand for good. They’re easy to find: available through your favorite walled garden of a store. They’re are easy to use: they stay right there in your device, making use of all your device’s…

The Story of a Novel Supply Chain Attack ✍︎ Ever since I started learning how to code, I have been fascinated by the level of trust we put in a simple command like this one: pip install package_name Some programming languages, like Python, come with an easy, more or less official method of…

The Spring Lisp Game Jam 2024 ended one week ago. 48 games were submitted, a new record for the jam! This past week has been a time for participants to play and rate each other’s games. As I explored

This is Part Two of Code As Design: Three Essays by Jack W. Reeves. Click here for the introduction. People have occasionally asked whether I did any follow-on writing to my "What Is Software Design"

This is Part One of Code As Design: Three Essays by Jack W. Reeves. Click here for the introduction. This essay first appeared in the Fall, 1992 issue of C++ Journal. Object oriented techniques, and C

From development environments to continuous integration—the ultimate guide to software development with Guix Ludovic Courtès — June 5, 2023 Guix is a handy tool for developers; guix shell, in particul