I may also have written on this on earlier versions of my website:
2006 – 2011 (link coming soon!)- did not have a blog!
2012 – 2013 (link coming soon!)2014 – 2019
topic: programming languages
Everything I’ve written on the subject, from the beginning of this version of the site.
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2020
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Mar
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01
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14:33 ❈ — NOTES
Zig is the first language that I’ve seen which seems interested in seriously playing in the same space as Rust.
And it does it in a substantially different way, which I like! It feels (reading docs) kind of like a “doing the kinds of things Rust does but with C instead of C++ as its direct competitor.”
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18:09 ❈ — NOTES
After digging in further: Zig is not doing quite what Rust is. It is an updated C, which eliminates some of the worst foot-guns, but fundamentally does not try to eliminate memory-unsafety… which profoundly disappoints me, even if I still wish Zig success.
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Aug
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08
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17:36 ❈ — NOTES
Finally decided to pick Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. I guess I’m finally going to have to spend more than twenty minutes with Ruby. 😅 (I’m mostly excited about Prolog, Clojure, and Haskell.)
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Sep
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05
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Data Constructors, Part 1: Understanding by Implementing — JOURNAL
Understanding an idea from Standard ML-like languages by implementing it in (boring) TypeScript.
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23
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19:53 ❈ — NOTES
Finally finished the Ruby chapter in Seven Languages in Seven Weeks and started into the chapter on Io… and am reminded why Io delighted me so much from the first time I encountered it half a decade ago. It’s just so incredibly elegant!
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Oct
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13
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Data Constructors, Part 2: Better TypeScript — JOURNAL
A deep dive on more idiomatic TypeScript implementations of ML-style data constructors.
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24
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Writing Robust TypeScript Libraries — JOURNAL
A subtler art than it might at first appear, if you intend to support JS or even loose mode TS.
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31
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12:20 ❈ — NOTES
Okay, Prolog is cool. (Still reading Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, though it’s taking a few more weeks than that.)
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Nov
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2021
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Jan
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22
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Using Classes for Functional Programming — JOURNAL
We tend to think classes are inherently for object-oriented programming, but they are much more flexible than that in JavaScript and TypeScript (and other languages too).
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Mar
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01
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21
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Progressive Disclosure of Complexity and Typed FP Languages — JOURNAL
Or, one part of why to some extent Elm, and to a significant degree PureScript Halogen, can be quite difficult for users to get their heads around at first.
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Jun
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16
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07:54 ❈ — NOTES
One reason I’m keen on programming languages as a tool for advancing software development is because reversion to the mean is real: working in JavaScript, I see daily how language affordances can make it easy for developers to do things which are terrible for maintenance… and make it hard for developers to do things which are good for maintenance, for just one example.
I could, and perhaps in a future post will, expand on a list of other things language affordances affect! The key, though, is the recognition that language affordances matter enormously, even if “you can write FORTRAN in any language.”
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