“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

As I was walking around The Computer History Museum in Mountain View yesterday I couldn’t shake this one quote that I’d read earlier that morning: “The computer is a feeling,” says Tim Hwang and Omar

This is a card in Dave's Virtual Box of Cards. Tiger Style! Created: 2023-05-08 Updated: 2024-04-15 I recently watched Joran Greef’s talk TigerStyle! (Or How To Design Safer Systems in Less Time) (you