the arc of software bends towards understanding
Fall is coming, and with it come hoards of ravenous Freshmen arriving on MIT’s campus. I’ll be doing three food events... all of them functional programming puns. Whee! Dumpling Hylomorphism Anamorphism: the building up of a structure. Catamorphism: the consumption of a structure. Hylomorphism: both an anamorphism and a catamorphism. This event? A hylomorphism on […]
This post was adapted from a post I made to the glasgow-haskell-users list. According to Control.Exception, the BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar exception (and related exception BlockedIndefinitelyOnSTM) is thrown when “the thread is blocked on an MVar, but there are no other references to the MVar so it can't ever continue.” The description is actually reasonably precise, but it […]
What do these problems have in common: recursive equality/ordering checks, printing string representations, serializing/unserializing binary protocols, hashing, generating getters/setters? They are repetitive boilerplate pieces of code that have a strong dependence on the structure of the data they operate over. Since programmers love automating things away, various schools of thought have emerged on how to […]
OCaml supports anonymous variant types, of the form type a = [`Foo of int | `Bar of bool], with the appropriate subtyping relations. Subtyping is, in general, kind of tricky, so I have been using these variant types fairly conservatively. (Even if a feature gives you too much rope, it can be manageable and useful […]
I’ll be at this year’s Hac Phi (coming up in a week and a half), and I am planning on working on in-program garbage collector statistics for GHC. There is nothing really technically difficult about this task (we just need to expose some functions in the RTS), but it’s not been done yet and I […]
In theory, Git supports custom, low-level merge drivers with the merge configuration properties. In practice, no one actually wants to write their own merge driver from scratch. Well, for many cases where a custom merge driver would come in handy, you don’t have to write your merge driver from scratch! Consider these cases: You want […]
It is not too difficult (scroll to “Non sequitur”) to create a combinator which combines two folds into a single fold that operates on a single input list in one pass. This is pretty important if your input list is pretty big, since doing the folds separately could result in a space leak, as might […]
This one's for the MIT crowd. This morning, I finished my Facebook module for BarnOwl to my satisfaction (my satisfaction being asynchronous support for Facebook API calls, i.e. no more random freezing!) Getting it to run on Linerva was a bit involved, however, so here is the recipe. Setup a local CPAN installation using the […]
It still feels a little strange how this happened. Not a year ago, I was pretty sure I was going to do the Masters of Engineering program at MIT, to make up for a “missed year” that was spent abroad (four years at MIT plus one at Cambridge, not a bad deal.) But a combination […]
I recently concluded a year long study-abroad program at the University of Cambridge. You can read my original reasons and first impressions here. It is the Sunday before the beginning of exams, and the weather is spectacular. Most students (except perhaps the pure historians) are dourly inside, too busy revising to take advantage of it. […]