the arc of software bends towards understanding
As one of those “busy maintainers,” I’ve noticed that I assume a certain cognitive mode when fielding support requests. This post is about how I deal with support requests, but I’ve also seen this behavior widely on other projects. While, as the person making the request, you may find such a mentality frustrating and obtuse, […]
For tomorrow I get on a plane traversing three thousand miles from my home to a little place named Cambridge, United Kingdom. I’ll be studying abroad for the 2010-2011 academic year at Cambridge University (specifically, I’ll be at Fitzwilliam college). While I know Baltimore is a fashionable place to be these days, if you’re in […]
Continuations are well known for being notoriously tricky to use: they are the “gotos” of the functional programming world. They can make a mess or do amazing things (after all, what are exceptions but a well structured nonlocal goto). This post is intended for readers with a passing familiarity with continuations but a disbelief that […]
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a colloquium given by Chung-Chieh Shan on Embedding Probabilistic Languages. A full account for the talk can be found in this paper, so I want to focus in on one specific big idea: the idea that data is code. Lispers are well acquainted with the mantra, “code is […]
This post is not meant as a rag on Darcs, just a observation of the difference between two philosophies of version control. Also, I’m a bit new to Darcs, so there might be some factual inaccuracies. Please let me know about them! At some point, I would like to write a Darcs for Git users […]
While I was studying session type encodings, I noticed something interesting: the fact that session types, in their desire to capture protocol control flow, find themselves implementing something strongly reminiscent of dependent types. Any reasonable session type encoding requires the ability to denote choice: in Simon Gay’s paper this is the T-Case rule, in Neubauer […]
Edward continues his spree of systems posts. Must be something in the Boston air. Yesterday, I gave a SIPB cluedump on the use and implementation of scripts.mit.edu, the shared host service that SIPB provides to the MIT community. I derive essentially all of my sysadmin experience points from helping maintain this service. Scripts is SIPB’s […]
Keyword arguments are generally considered a good thing by language designers: positional arguments are prone to errors of transposition, and it’s absolutely no fun trying to guess what the 37 that is the third argument of a function actually means. Python is one language that makes extensive use of keyword arguments; they have the following […]
Last post, I talked about some of the notable difficulties in emulating pthread_cancel on Windows. Today, I want to talk about what a platform agnostic compiler like GHC actually ought to do. Recall our three design goals: GHC would like to be able to put blocking IO calls on a worker thread but cancel them […]
Edward, I’m afraid I have some bad news. Your interruptible GHC patch; it was involved in a terrible accident on the way to Windows portability. I hope you understand: we’re doing our best to patch it up, but there have been some complications... Pop quiz! What does this pthreads code do? #include <pthread.h> #include <stdio.h> […]