the arc of software bends towards understanding
(Last IMAP themed post for a while, I promise!) Well, first off, you’re horribly misinformed: you do not actually want to hack on IMAP. But supposing, for some masochistic reason, you need to dig in the guts of your mail synchronizer and fix a bug or add some features. There are a few useful things […]
I am going to share a dirty little secret with you, a secret that only someone who uses and hacks on OfflineIMAP could reasonably know: OfflineIMAP sucks. Of course, you can still use software that sucks (I do all the time), but it’s useful to know what some of its deficiencies are, so that you […]
As software engineers, we are trained to be a little distrustful of marketing copy like this: OfflineIMAP is SAFE; it uses an algorithm designed to prevent mail loss at all costs. Because of the design of this algorithm, even programming errors should not result in loss of mail. I am so confident in the algorithm […]
After a long delay and a lot of editing, Issue 20 of The Monad Reader is finally out. Check it out!
On the importance of primary sources. (Introductory material ahead.) Most readers of this blog should have at least a passing familiarity with applicative functors: class Applicative f where pure :: a -> f a (<*>) :: f (a -> b) -> f a -> f b This interface is quite convenient for day-to-day programming (in […]
Robert Harper has (somewhat) recently released a pre-print of a book (PDF) that he has been working on, Practical Foundations for Programming Languages. I downloaded a copy when it initially came out, but I was guilty of putting off actually digging into the book’s 590-some pages. It was only until Harper successfully baited me with […]
Steve Yegge has posted a fun article attempting to apply the liberal and conservative labels to software engineering. It is, of course, a gross oversimplification (which Yegge admits). For example, he concludes that Haskell must be “extreme conservative”, mostly pointing at its extreme emphasis on safety. This completely misses one of the best things about […]
A common simplification when discussing many divide and conquer algorithms is the assumption that the input list has a size which is a power of two. As such, one might wonder: how do we encode lists that have power of two sizes, in a way that lists that don’t have this property are unrepresentable? One […]