ezyang’s blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

July, 2010

Groom: human readable Show for Haskell

Tapping away at a complex datastructure, I find myself facing a veritable wall of Babel. “Zounds!” I exclaim, “The GHC gods have cursed me once again with a derived Show instance with no whitespace!” I mutter discontently to myself, and begin pairing up parentheses and brackets, scanning the sheet of text for some discernible feature […]

  • July 7, 2010

Little’s law

A short thought from standing in line at the World Expo: Little’s law is a remarkable result that relates the number of people in a queue, the arrival rate of people to the queue, and the time spent waiting in the queue. It seems that it could be easily applied to a most universal feature […]

  • July 5, 2010

MVC and Purity

Attention conservation notice. Purely functional programming demonstrates the same practices recommended by object-oriented MVC practice. Model-View-Controller is a widely used object-oriented design pattern for organizing functionality in an application with a user interface. I first ran across it in my early days programming web applications. The Model/View separation made deep intuitive sense to me as […]

  • July 2, 2010